A Compositional Typed Semantics for Universal Dependencies
This addresses the problem of cross-linguistic semantic parsing for NLP researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing dependency frameworks.
The paper tackles the challenge of deriving meanings from sentences across different languages by introducing UD Type Calculus, a language-independent system of semantic types and logical forms based on dependency syntax, and shows it produces meanings comparable to a baseline on a large corpus.
Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we can take advantage of language-general connections between meaning and syntax, and build on cross-linguistically parallel syntactic structures. We introduce UD Type Calculus, a compositional, principled, and language-independent system of semantic types and logical forms for lexical items which builds on a widely-used language-general dependency syntax framework. We explain the essential features of UD Type Calculus, which all involve giving dependency relations denotations just like those of words. These allow UD-TC to derive correct meanings for sentences with a wide range of syntactic structures by making use of dependency labels. Finally, we present evaluation results on a large existing corpus of sentences and their logical forms, showing that UD-TC can produce meanings comparable with our baseline.