Universal Semantic Parsing

Siva Reddy, Oscar Täckström, Slav Petrov, Mark Steedman, Mirella Lapata


Abstract
Universal Dependencies (UD) offer a uniform cross-lingual syntactic representation, with the aim of advancing multilingual applications. Recent work shows that semantic parsing can be accomplished by transforming syntactic dependencies to logical forms. However, this work is limited to English, and cannot process dependency graphs, which allow handling complex phenomena such as control. In this work, we introduce UDepLambda, a semantic interface for UD, which maps natural language to logical forms in an almost language-independent fashion and can process dependency graphs. We perform experiments on question answering against Freebase and provide German and Spanish translations of the WebQuestions and GraphQuestions datasets to facilitate multilingual evaluation. Results show that UDepLambda outperforms strong baselines across languages and datasets. For English, it achieves a 4.9 F1 point improvement over the state-of-the-art on GraphQuestions.
Anthology ID:
D17-1009
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
89–101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1009
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1009
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siva Reddy, Oscar Täckström, Slav Petrov, Mark Steedman, and Mirella Lapata. 2017. Universal Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 89–101, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Universal Semantic Parsing (Reddy et al., EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/D17-1009.pdf
Attachment:
 D17-1009.Attachment.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/D17-1009.mp4
Code
 sivareddyg/udeplambda