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arXiv · 2403.01187

A Compositional Typed Semantics for Universal Dependencies

Laurestine Bradford·Timothy John O'Donnell·Siva Reddy
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Abstract

Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we can take advantage of language-general connections between meaning and syntax, and build on cross-linguistically parallel syntactic structures. We introduce UD Type Calculus, a compositional, principled, and language-independent system of semantic types and logical forms for lexical items which builds on a widely-used language-general dependency syntax framework. We explain the essential features of UD Type Calculus, which all involve giving dependency relations denotations just like those of words. These allow UD-TC to derive correct meanings for sentences with a wide range of syntactic structures by making use of dependency labels. Finally, we present evaluation results on a large existing corpus of sentences and their logical forms, showing that UD-TC can produce meanings comparable with our baseline.

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Laurestine Bradford, Timothy John O'Donnell, Siva Reddy. 2024-03-02. A Compositional Typed Semantics for Universal Dependencies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01187

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