Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech

Nianwen Xue, Ondřej Bojar, Jan Hajič, Martha Palmer, Zdeňka Urešová, Xiuhong Zhang

Abstract
Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) are rooted, directional and labeled graphs that abstract away from morpho-syntactic idiosyncrasies such as word category (verbs and nouns), word order, and function words (determiners, some prepositions). Because these syntactic idiosyncrasies account for many of the cross-lingual differences, it would be interesting to see if this representation can serve, e.g., as a useful, minimally divergent transfer layer in machine translation. To answer this question, we have translated 100 English sentences that have existing AMRs into Chinese and Czech to create AMRs for them. A cross-linguistic comparison of English to Chinese and Czech AMRs reveals both cases where the AMRs for the language pairs align well structurally and cases of linguistic divergence. We found that the level of compatibility of AMR between English and Chinese is higher than between English and Czech. We believe this kind of comparison is beneficial to further refining the annotation standards for each of the three languages and will lead to more compatible annotation guidelines between the languages.
Anthology ID:
L14-1332
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1765–1772
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/384_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nianwen Xue, Ondřej Bojar, Jan Hajič, Martha Palmer, Zdeňka Urešová, and Xiuhong Zhang. 2014. Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 1765–1772, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech (Xue et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/384_Paper.pdf
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