Semantic Parsing for English as a Second Language

Yuanyuan Zhao, Weiwei Sun, Junjie Cao, Xiaojun Wan


Abstract
This paper is concerned with semantic parsing for English as a second language (ESL). Motivated by the theoretical emphasis on the learning challenges that occur at the syntax-semantics interface during second language acquisition, we formulate the task based on the divergence between literal and intended meanings. We combine the complementary strengths of English Resource Grammar, a linguistically-precise hand-crafted deep grammar, and TLE, an existing manually annotated ESL UD-TreeBank with a novel reranking model. Experiments demonstrate that in comparison to human annotations, our method can obtain a very promising SemBanking quality. By means of the newly created corpus, we evaluate state-of-the-art semantic parsing as well as grammatical error correction models. The evaluation profiles the performance of neural NLP techniques for handling ESL data and suggests some research directions.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.606
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6783–6794
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.606
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.606
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanyuan Zhao, Weiwei Sun, Junjie Cao, and Xiaojun Wan. 2020. Semantic Parsing for English as a Second Language. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6783–6794, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Parsing for English as a Second Language (Zhao et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2020.acl-main.606.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929300