@inproceedings{hershcovich-etal-2019-content,
title = "Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representation",
author = "Hershcovich, Daniel and
Abend, Omri and
Rappoport, Ari",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)",
month = jun,
year = "2019",
address = "Minneapolis, Minnesota",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/N19-1047",
doi = "10.18653/v1/N19-1047",
pages = "478--488",
abstract = "Syntactic analysis plays an important role in semantic parsing, but the nature of this role remains a topic of ongoing debate. The debate has been constrained by the scarcity of empirical comparative studies between syntactic and semantic schemes, which hinders the development of parsing methods informed by the details of target schemes and constructions. We target this gap, and take Universal Dependencies (UD) and UCCA as a test case. After abstracting away from differences of convention or formalism, we find that most content divergences can be ascribed to: (1) UCCA{'}s distinction between a Scene and a non-Scene; (2) UCCA{'}s distinction between primary relations, secondary ones and participants; (3) different treatment of multi-word expressions, and (4) different treatment of inter-clause linkage. We further discuss the long tail of cases where the two schemes take markedly different approaches. Finally, we show that the proposed comparison methodology can be used for fine-grained evaluation of UCCA parsing, highlighting both challenges and potential sources for improvement. The substantial differences between the schemes suggest that semantic parsers are likely to benefit downstream text understanding applications beyond their syntactic counterparts.",
}
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representation
%A Hershcovich, Daniel
%A Abend, Omri
%A Rappoport, Ari
%S Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
%D 2019
%8 jun
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Minneapolis, Minnesota
%F hershcovich-etal-2019-content
%X Syntactic analysis plays an important role in semantic parsing, but the nature of this role remains a topic of ongoing debate. The debate has been constrained by the scarcity of empirical comparative studies between syntactic and semantic schemes, which hinders the development of parsing methods informed by the details of target schemes and constructions. We target this gap, and take Universal Dependencies (UD) and UCCA as a test case. After abstracting away from differences of convention or formalism, we find that most content divergences can be ascribed to: (1) UCCA’s distinction between a Scene and a non-Scene; (2) UCCA’s distinction between primary relations, secondary ones and participants; (3) different treatment of multi-word expressions, and (4) different treatment of inter-clause linkage. We further discuss the long tail of cases where the two schemes take markedly different approaches. Finally, we show that the proposed comparison methodology can be used for fine-grained evaluation of UCCA parsing, highlighting both challenges and potential sources for improvement. The substantial differences between the schemes suggest that semantic parsers are likely to benefit downstream text understanding applications beyond their syntactic counterparts.
%R 10.18653/v1/N19-1047
%U https://aclanthology.org/N19-1047
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1047
%P 478-488
Markdown (Informal)
[Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representation](https://aclanthology.org/N19-1047) (Hershcovich et al., NAACL 2019)
ACL
- Daniel Hershcovich, Omri Abend, and Ari Rappoport. 2019. Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 478–488, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.