A Structured Syntax-Semantics Interface for English-AMR Alignment

Ida Szubert, Adam Lopez, Nathan Schneider


Abstract
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotations are often assumed to closely mirror dependency syntax, but AMR explicitly does not require this, and the assumption has never been tested. To test it, we devise an expressive framework to align AMR graphs to dependency graphs, which we use to annotate 200 AMRs. Our annotation explains how 97% of AMR edges are evoked by words or syntax. Previously existing AMR alignment frameworks did not allow for mapping AMR onto syntax, and as a consequence they explained at most 23%. While we find that there are indeed many cases where AMR annotations closely mirror syntax, there are also pervasive differences. We use our annotations to test a baseline AMR-to-syntax aligner, finding that this task is more difficult than AMR-to-string alignment; and to pinpoint errors in an AMR parser. We make our data and code freely available for further research on AMR parsing and generation, and the relationship of AMR to syntax.
Anthology ID:
N18-1106
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1169–1180
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1106
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1106
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ida Szubert, Adam Lopez, and Nathan Schneider. 2018. A Structured Syntax-Semantics Interface for English-AMR Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1169–1180, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Structured Syntax-Semantics Interface for English-AMR Alignment (Szubert et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/N18-1106.pdf
Video:
 http://vimeo.com/276898193
Code
 ida-szubert/amr_ud