DRS at MRP 2020: Dressing up Discourse Representation Structures as Graphs

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to convert Discourse Representation Structures into directed labeled graphs, integrating DRT into a unified graph-based framework for semantic parsing shared tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a procedure to represent DRT as graphs, facilitating comparison and integration with other semantic frameworks in shared tasks.

Findings

DRS can be effectively represented as directed labeled graphs.

The conversion aligns DRT with other graph-based semantic frameworks.

Supports development of unified models for multiple semantic representations.

Abstract

Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) is a formal account for representing the meaning of natural language discourse. Meaning in DRT is modeled via a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS), a meaning representation with a model-theoretic interpretation, which is usually depicted as nested boxes. In contrast, a directed labeled graph is a common data structure used to encode semantics of natural language texts. The paper describes the procedure of dressing up DRSs as directed labeled graphs to include DRT as a new framework in the 2020 shared task on Cross-Framework and Cross-Lingual Meaning Representation Parsing. Since one of the goals of the shared task is to encourage unified models for several semantic graph frameworks, the conversion procedure was biased towards making the DRT graph framework somewhat similar to other graph-based meaning representation frameworks.