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
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.147/
DOI:
Bibkey:
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)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.147.pdf