Lasha Abzianidze


2023

pdf bib
SpaceNLI: Evaluating the Consistency of Predicting Inferences In Space
Lasha Abzianidze | Joost Zwarts | Yoad Winter
Proceedings of the 4th Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning Workshop

While many natural language inference (NLI) datasets target certain semantic phenomena, e.g., negation, tense & aspect, monotonicity, and presupposition, to the best of our knowledge, there is no NLI dataset that involves diverse types of spatial expressions and reasoning. We fill this gap by semi-automatically creating an NLI dataset for spatial reasoning, called SpaceNLI. The data samples are automatically generated from a curated set of reasoning patterns (see Figure 1), where the patterns are annotated with inference labels by experts. We test several SOTA NLI systems on SpaceNLI to gauge the complexity of the dataset and the system’s capacity for spatial reasoning. Moreover, we introduce a Pattern Accuracy and argue that it is a more reliable and stricter measure than the accuracy for evaluating a system’s performance on pattern-based generated data samples. Based on the evaluation results we find that the systems obtain moderate results on the spatial NLI problems but lack consistency per inference pattern. The results also reveal that non-projective spatial inferences (especially due to the “between” preposition) are the most challenging ones.

2021

pdf bib
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS)
Sina Zarrieß | Johan Bos | Rik van Noord | Lasha Abzianidze
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS)

2020

pdf
Learning as Abduction: Trainable Natural Logic Theorem Prover for Natural Language Inference
Lasha Abzianidze
Proceedings of the Ninth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

Tackling Natural Language Inference with a logic-based method is becoming less and less common. While this might have been counterintuitive several decades ago, nowadays it seems pretty obvious. The main reasons for such a conception are that (a) logic-based methods are usually brittle when it comes to processing wide-coverage texts, and (b) instead of automatically learning from data, they require much of manual effort for development. We make a step towards to overcome such shortcomings by modeling learning from data as abduction: reversing a theorem-proving procedure to abduce semantic relations that serve as the best explanation for the gold label of an inference problem. In other words, instead of proving sentence-level inference relations with the help of lexical relations, the lexical relations are proved taking into account the sentence-level inference relations. We implement the learning method in a tableau theorem prover for natural language and show that it improves the performance of the theorem prover on the SICK dataset by 1.4% while still maintaining high precision (>94%). The obtained results are competitive with the state of the art among logic-based systems.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2020 Shared Task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing
Stephan Oepen | Omri Abend | Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos | Jan Hajič | Daniel Hershcovich | Bin Li | Tim O'Gorman | Nianwen Xue | Daniel Zeman
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2020 Shared Task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing

pdf bib
MRP 2020: The Second Shared Task on Cross-Framework and Cross-Lingual Meaning Representation Parsing
Stephan Oepen | Omri Abend | Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos | Jan Hajic | Daniel Hershcovich | Bin Li | Tim O’Gorman | Nianwen Xue | Daniel Zeman
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2020 Shared Task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing

The 2020 Shared Task at the Conference for Computational Language Learning (CoNLL) was devoted to Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP) across frameworks and languages. Extending a similar setup from the previous year, five distinct approaches to the representation of sentence meaning in the form of directed graphs were represented in the English training and evaluation data for the task, packaged in a uniform graph abstraction and serialization; for four of these representation frameworks, additional training and evaluation data was provided for one additional language per framework. The task received submissions from eight teams, of which two do not participate in the official ranking because they arrived after the closing deadline or made use of additional training data. All technical information regarding the task, including system submissions, official results, and links to supporting resources and software are available from the task web site at: http://mrp.nlpl.eu

pdf bib
DRS at MRP 2020: Dressing up Discourse Representation Structures as Graphs
Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos | Stephan Oepen
Proceedings of the CoNLL 2020 Shared Task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing

Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) is a formal account for representing the meaning of natural language discourse. Meaning in DRT is modeled via a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS), a meaning representation with a model-theoretic interpretation, which is usually depicted as nested boxes. In contrast, a directed labeled graph is a common data structure used to encode semantics of natural language texts. The paper describes the procedure of dressing up DRSs as directed labeled graphs to include DRT as a new framework in the 2020 shared task on Cross-Framework and Cross-Lingual Meaning Representation Parsing. Since one of the goals of the shared task is to encourage unified models for several semantic graph frameworks, the conversion procedure was biased towards making the DRT graph framework somewhat similar to other graph-based meaning representation frameworks.

2019

pdf
HELP: A Dataset for Identifying Shortcomings of Neural Models in Monotonicity Reasoning
Hitomi Yanaka | Koji Mineshima | Daisuke Bekki | Kentaro Inui | Satoshi Sekine | Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)

Large crowdsourced datasets are widely used for training and evaluating neural models on natural language inference (NLI). Despite these efforts, neural models have a hard time capturing logical inferences, including those licensed by phrase replacements, so-called monotonicity reasoning. Since no large dataset has been developed for monotonicity reasoning, it is still unclear whether the main obstacle is the size of datasets or the model architectures themselves. To investigate this issue, we introduce a new dataset, called HELP, for handling entailments with lexical and logical phenomena. We add it to training data for the state-of-the-art neural models and evaluate them on test sets for monotonicity phenomena. The results showed that our data augmentation improved the overall accuracy. We also find that the improvement is better on monotonicity inferences with lexical replacements than on downward inferences with disjunction and modification. This suggests that some types of inferences can be improved by our data augmentation while others are immune to it.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the IWCS Shared Task on Semantic Parsing
Lasha Abzianidze | Rik van Noord | Hessel Haagsma | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the IWCS Shared Task on Semantic Parsing

pdf bib
The First Shared Task on Discourse Representation Structure Parsing
Lasha Abzianidze | Rik van Noord | Hessel Haagsma | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the IWCS Shared Task on Semantic Parsing

The paper presents the IWCS 2019 shared task on semantic parsing where the goal is to produce Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) for English sentences. DRSs originate from Discourse Representation Theory and represent scoped meaning representations that capture the semantics of negation, modals, quantification, and presupposition triggers. Additionally, concepts and event-participants in DRSs are described with WordNet synsets and the thematic roles from VerbNet. To measure similarity between two DRSs, they are represented in a clausal form, i.e. as a set of tuples. Participant systems were expected to produce DRSs in this clausal form. Taking into account the rich lexical information, explicit scope marking, a high number of shared variables among clauses, and highly-constrained format of valid DRSs, all these makes the DRS parsing a challenging NLP task. The results of the shared task displayed improvements over the existing state-of-the-art parser.

pdf bib
Thirty Musts for Meaning Banking
Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

Meaning banking—creating a semantically annotated corpus for the purpose of semantic parsing or generation—is a challenging task. It is quite simple to come up with a complex meaning representation, but it is hard to design a simple meaning representation that captures many nuances of meaning. This paper lists some lessons learned in nearly ten years of meaning annotation during the development of the Groningen Meaning Bank (Bos et al., 2017) and the Parallel Meaning Bank (Abzianidze et al., 2017). The paper’s format is rather unconventional: there is no explicit related work, no methodology section, no results, and no discussion (and the current snippet is not an abstract but actually an introductory preface). Instead, its structure is inspired by work of Traum (2000) and Bender (2013). The list starts with a brief overview of the existing meaning banks (Section 1) and the rest of the items are roughly divided into three groups: corpus collection (Section 2 and 3, annotation methods (Section 4–11), and design of meaning representations (Section 12–30). We hope this overview will give inspiration and guidance in creating improved meaning banks in the future

pdf
CCGweb: a New Annotation Tool and a First Quadrilingual CCG Treebank
Kilian Evang | Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

We present the first open-source graphical annotation tool for combinatory categorial grammar (CCG), and the first set of detailed guidelines for syntactic annotation with CCG, for four languages: English, German, Italian, and Dutch. We also release a parallel pilot CCG treebank based on these guidelines, with 4x100 adjudicated sentences, 10K single-annotator fully corrected sentences, and 82K single-annotator partially corrected sentences.

pdf
Can Neural Networks Understand Monotonicity Reasoning?
Hitomi Yanaka | Koji Mineshima | Daisuke Bekki | Kentaro Inui | Satoshi Sekine | Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 2019 ACL Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Monotonicity reasoning is one of the important reasoning skills for any intelligent natural language inference (NLI) model in that it requires the ability to capture the interaction between lexical and syntactic structures. Since no test set has been developed for monotonicity reasoning with wide coverage, it is still unclear whether neural models can perform monotonicity reasoning in a proper way. To investigate this issue, we introduce the Monotonicity Entailment Dataset (MED). Performance by state-of-the-art NLI models on the new test set is substantially worse, under 55%, especially on downward reasoning. In addition, analysis using a monotonicity-driven data augmentation method showed that these models might be limited in their generalization ability in upward and downward reasoning.

2018

pdf
Exploring Neural Methods for Parsing Discourse Representation Structures
Rik van Noord | Lasha Abzianidze | Antonio Toral | Johan Bos
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6

Neural methods have had several recent successes in semantic parsing, though they have yet to face the challenge of producing meaning representations based on formal semantics. We present a sequence-to-sequence neural semantic parser that is able to produce Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) for English sentences with high accuracy, outperforming traditional DRS parsers. To facilitate the learning of the output, we represent DRSs as a sequence of flat clauses and introduce a method to verify that produced DRSs are well-formed and interpretable. We compare models using characters and words as input and see (somewhat surprisingly) that the former performs better than the latter. We show that eliminating variable names from the output using De Bruijn indices increases parser performance. Adding silver training data boosts performance even further.

pdf
What can we learn from Semantic Tagging?
Mostafa Abdou | Artur Kulmizev | Vinit Ravishankar | Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We investigate the effects of multi-task learning using the recently introduced task of semantic tagging. We employ semantic tagging as an auxiliary task for three different NLP tasks: part-of-speech tagging, Universal Dependency parsing, and Natural Language Inference. We compare full neural network sharing, partial neural network sharing, and what we term the learning what to share setting where negative transfer between tasks is less likely. Our findings show considerable improvements for all tasks, particularly in the learning what to share setting which shows consistent gains across all tasks.

pdf
Evaluating Scoped Meaning Representations
Rik van Noord | Lasha Abzianidze | Hessel Haagsma | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

pdf
LangPro: Natural Language Theorem Prover
Lasha Abzianidze
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

LangPro is an automated theorem prover for natural language. Given a set of premises and a hypothesis, it is able to prove semantic relations between them. The prover is based on a version of analytic tableau method specially designed for natural logic. The proof procedure operates on logical forms that preserve linguistic expressions to a large extent. %This property makes the logical forms easily obtainable from syntactic trees. %, in particular, Combinatory Categorial Grammar derivation trees. The nature of proofs is deductive and transparent. On the FraCaS and SICK textual entailment datasets, the prover achieves high results comparable to state-of-the-art.

pdf
The Parallel Meaning Bank: Towards a Multilingual Corpus of Translations Annotated with Compositional Meaning Representations
Lasha Abzianidze | Johannes Bjerva | Kilian Evang | Hessel Haagsma | Rik van Noord | Pierre Ludmann | Duc-Duy Nguyen | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

The Parallel Meaning Bank is a corpus of translations annotated with shared, formal meaning representations comprising over 11 million words divided over four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch). Our approach is based on cross-lingual projection: automatically produced (and manually corrected) semantic annotations for English sentences are mapped onto their word-aligned translations, assuming that the translations are meaning-preserving. The semantic annotation consists of five main steps: (i) segmentation of the text in sentences and lexical items; (ii) syntactic parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar; (iii) universal semantic tagging; (iv) symbolization; and (v) compositional semantic analysis based on Discourse Representation Theory. These steps are performed using statistical models trained in a semi-supervised manner. The employed annotation models are all language-neutral. Our first results are promising.

pdf bib
Towards Universal Semantic Tagging
Lasha Abzianidze | Johan Bos
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) — Short papers

pdf
Last Words: Sharing Is Caring: The Future of Shared Tasks
Malvina Nissim | Lasha Abzianidze | Kilian Evang | Rob van der Goot | Hessel Haagsma | Barbara Plank | Martijn Wieling
Computational Linguistics, Volume 43, Issue 4 - December 2017

2016

pdf
Natural Solution to FraCaS Entailment Problems
Lasha Abzianidze
Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

2015

pdf
A Tableau Prover for Natural Logic and Language
Lasha Abzianidze
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing