Made for Each Other: Broad-coverage Semantic Structures Meet Preposition Supersenses

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating preposition semantic roles into the UCCA framework, demonstrating compatibility and proposing methods for combined semantic graph parsing in English.

Contribution

It introduces a way to incorporate preposition semantic roles into UCCA, enabling unified semantic representations.

Findings

UCCA and preposition roles are compatible for integration.

Combined semantic graphs can be effectively parsed.

The approach lays groundwork for future semantic parsing research.

Abstract

Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA; Abend and Rappoport, 2013) is a typologically-informed, broad-coverage semantic annotation scheme that describes coarse-grained predicate-argument structure but currently lacks semantic roles. We argue that lexicon-free annotation of the semantic roles marked by prepositions, as formulated by Schneider et al. (2018b), is complementary and suitable for integration within UCCA. We show empirically for English that the schemes, though annotated independently, are compatible and can be combined in a single semantic graph. A comparison of several approaches to parsing the integrated representation lays the groundwork for future research on this task.