QA-Noun: Representing Nominal Semantics via Natural Language Question-Answer Pairs
Maria Tseytlin, Paul Roit, Omri Abend, Ido Dagan, Ayal Klein
Abstract
Decomposing sentences into fine-grained meaning units is increasingly used to model semantic alignment. While QA-based semantic approaches have shown effectiveness for representing predicate-argument relations, they have so far left noun-centered semantics largely unaddressed. We introduce QA-Noun, a QA-based framework for capturing noun-centered semantic relations. QA-Noun defines nine question templates that cover both explicit syntactical and implicit contextual roles for nouns, producing interpretable QA pairs that complement verbal QA-SRL. We release detailed guidelines, a dataset of over 2,000 annotated noun mentions, and a trained model integrated with QA-SRL to yield a unified decomposition of sentence meaning into individual, highly fine-grained, facts. Evaluation shows that QA-Noun achieves near-complete coverage of AMR’s noun arguments while surfacing additional contextually implied relations, and that combining QA-Noun with QA-SRL yields over 130% higher granularity than recent fact-based decomposition methods such as FactScore and DecompScore. QA-Noun thus complements the broader QA-based semantic framework, forming a comprehensive and scalable approach to fine-grained semantic decomposition for cross-text alignment.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.ijcnlp-long.147
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Mumbai, India
- Editors:
- Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
- Venues:
- IJCNLP | AACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2727–2741
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.147/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Maria Tseytlin, Paul Roit, Omri Abend, Ido Dagan, and Ayal Klein. 2025. QA-Noun: Representing Nominal Semantics via Natural Language Question-Answer Pairs. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2727–2741, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- QA-Noun: Representing Nominal Semantics via Natural Language Question-Answer Pairs (Tseytlin et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.147.pdf