We present the first parser for UCCA, a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, which builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. UCCA poses a challenge for existing parsing techniques, as it exhibits reentrancy (resulting in DAG structures), discontinuous structures and non-terminal nodes corresponding to complex semantic units. To our knowledge, the conjunction of these formal properties is not supported by any existing parser. Our transition-based parser, which uses a novel transition set and features based on bidirectional LSTMs, has value not just for UCCA parsing: its ability to handle more general graph structures can inform the development of parsers for other semantic DAG structures, and in languages that frequently use discontinuous structures.
Furthermore, existing transition-based AMR parsers are not general DAG parsers. They are only able to predict a subset of reentrancies and discontinuities, as they may remove nodes before their parents have been predicted @cite_3 . They are thus limited to a sub-class of AMRs in particular, and specifically cannot produce arbitrary DAG parses. 's transition set, on the other hand, allows general DAG parsing. See Appendix for a proof sketch for the completeness of 's transition set.
@cite_3
2250623140 595069947 2296308987 2114887620
We propose a grammar induction technique for AMR semantic parsing. While previous grammar induction techniques were designed to re-learn a new parser for each target application, the recently annotated AMR Bank provides a unique opportunity to induce a single model for understanding broad-coverage newswire text and support a wide range of applications. We present a new model that combines CCG parsing to recover compositional aspects of meaning and a factor graph to model non-compositional phenomena, such as anaphoric dependencies. Our approach achieves 66.2 Smatch F1 score on the AMR bank, significantly outperforming the previous state of the art. The standard training regime for transition-based dependency parsers makes use of an oracle, which predicts an optimal transition sequence for a sentence and its gold tree. We present an improved oracle for the arc-eager transition system, which provides a set of optimal transitions for every valid parser configuration, including configurations from which the gold tree is not reachable. In such cases, the oracle provides transitions that will lead to the best reachable tree from the given configuration. The oracle is efficient to implement and provably correct. We use the oracle to train a deterministic left-to-right dependency parser that is less sensitive to error propagation, using an online training procedure that also explores parser configurations resulting from non-optimal sequences of transitions. This new parser outperforms greedy parsers trained using conventional oracles on a range of data sets, with an average improvement of over 1.2 LAS points and up to almost 3 LAS points on some data sets. We present a two-stage framework to parse a sentence into its Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). We first use a dependency parser to generate a dependency tree for the sentence. In the second stage, we design a novel transition-based algorithm that transforms the dependency tree to an AMR graph. There are several advantages with this approach. First, the dependency parser can be trained on a training set much larger than the training set for the tree-to-graph algorithm, resulting in a more accurate AMR parser overall. Our parser yields an improvement of 5 absolute in F-measure over the best previous result. Second, the actions that we design are linguistically intuitive and capture the regularities in the mapping between the dependency structure and the AMR of a sentence. Third, our parser runs in nearly linear time in practice in spite of a worst-case complexity ofO(n 2 ). Transition-based dependency parsers generally use heuristic decoding algorithms but can accommodate arbitrarily rich feature representations. In this paper, we show that we can improve the accuracy of such parsers by considering even richer feature sets than those employed in previous systems. In the standard Penn Treebank setup, our novel features improve attachment score form 91.4 to 92.9 , giving the best results so far for transition-based parsing and rivaling the best results overall. For the Chinese Treebank, they give a signficant improvement of the state of the art. An open source release of our parser is freely available.