Wessel Poelman


2022

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RUG-1-Pegasussers at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Data Generation Methods to Improve Recognizing Appropriate Taxonomic Word Relations
Wessel Poelman | Gijs Danoe | Esther Ploeger | Frank van den Berg | Tommaso Caselli | Lukas Edman
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper describes our system created for the SemEval 2022 Task 3: Presupposed Taxonomies - Evaluating Neural-network Semantics. This task is focused on correctly recognizing taxonomic word relations in English, French and Italian. We developed various datageneration techniques that expand the originally provided train set and show that all methods increase the performance of modelstrained on these expanded datasets. Our final system outperformed the baseline system from the task organizers by achieving an average macro F1 score of 79.6 on all languages, compared to the baseline’s 67.4.

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Transparent Semantic Parsing with Universal Dependencies Using Graph Transformations
Wessel Poelman | Rik van Noord | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Even though many recent semantic parsers are based on deep learning methods, we should not forget that rule-based alternatives might offer advantages over neural approaches with respect to transparency, portability, and explainability. Taking advantage of existing off-the-shelf Universal Dependency parsers, we present a method that maps a syntactic dependency tree to a formal meaning representation based on Discourse Representation Theory. Rather than using lambda calculus to manage variable bindings, our approach is novel in that it consists of using a series of graph transformations. The resulting UD semantic parser shows good performance for English, German, Italian and Dutch, with F-scores over 75%, outperforming a neural semantic parser for the lower-resourced languages. Unlike neural semantic parsers, our UD semantic parser does not hallucinate output, is relatively easy to port to other languages, and is completely transparent.