2019/03/15 by Daniel Hershcovich, Omri Abend, Hershcovich, Daniel +3
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Text Readability and Simplification #Topic Modeling #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1903.06494
NAACL-HLT 2019 camera ready
openalex publication_date 2019/03/15 · arxiv created 2019/05/01 · arxiv updated 2019/05/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.