18,618 research outputs found
Abstract syntax as interlingua: Scaling up the grammatical framework from controlled languages to robust pipelines
Syntax is an interlingual representation used in compilers. Grammatical Framework (GF) applies the abstract syntax idea to natural languages. The development of GF started in 1998, first as a tool for controlled language implementations, where it has gained an established position in both academic and commercial projects. GF provides grammar resources for over 40 languages, enabling accurate generation and translation, as well as grammar engineering tools and components for mobile and Web applications. On the research side, the focus in the last ten years has been on scaling up GF to wide-coverage language processing. The concept of abstract syntax offers a unified view on many other approaches: Universal Dependencies, WordNets, FrameNets, Construction Grammars, and Abstract Meaning Representations. This makes it possible for GF to utilize data from the other approaches and to build robust pipelines. In return, GF can contribute to data-driven approaches by methods to transfer resources from one language to others, to augment data by rule-based generation, to check the consistency of hand-annotated corpora, and to pipe analyses into high-precision semantic back ends. This article gives an overview of the use of abstract syntax as interlingua through both established and emerging NLP applications involving GF
Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representations
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.Comment: NAACL-HLT 2019 camera read
Universal Dependencies Parsing for Colloquial Singaporean English
Singlish can be interesting to the ACL community both linguistically as a
major creole based on English, and computationally for information extraction
and sentiment analysis of regional social media. We investigate dependency
parsing of Singlish by constructing a dependency treebank under the Universal
Dependencies scheme, and then training a neural network model by integrating
English syntactic knowledge into a state-of-the-art parser trained on the
Singlish treebank. Results show that English knowledge can lead to 25% relative
error reduction, resulting in a parser of 84.47% accuracies. To the best of our
knowledge, we are the first to use neural stacking to improve cross-lingual
dependency parsing on low-resource languages. We make both our annotation and
parser available for further research.Comment: Accepted by ACL 201
Relating Nominal and Higher-order Abstract Syntax Specifications
Nominal abstract syntax and higher-order abstract syntax provide a means for
describing binding structure which is higher-level than traditional techniques.
These approaches have spawned two different communities which have developed
along similar lines but with subtle differences that make them difficult to
relate. The nominal abstract syntax community has devices like names,
freshness, name-abstractions with variable capture, and the new-quantifier,
whereas the higher-order abstract syntax community has devices like
lambda-binders, lambda-conversion, raising, and the nabla-quantifier. This
paper aims to unify these communities and provide a concrete correspondence
between their different devices. In particular, we develop a
semantics-preserving translation from alpha-Prolog, a nominal abstract syntax
based logic programming language, to G-, a higher-order abstract syntax based
logic programming language. We also discuss higher-order judgments, a common
and powerful tool for specifications with higher-order abstract syntax, and we
show how these can be incorporated into G-. This establishes G- as a language
with the power of higher-order abstract syntax, the fine-grained variable
control of nominal specifications, and the desirable properties of higher-order
judgments.Comment: To appear in PPDP 201
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