Joint Universal Syntactic and Semantic Parsing

TL;DR

This paper presents a joint parsing model for syntax and semantics that leverages rich annotations to achieve state-of-the-art results across multiple languages, revealing linguistic patterns at the interface.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint parsing architecture that effectively combines syntactic and semantic analysis using the UDS dataset, outperforming previous methods.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results in syntax and semantics parsing.

Identifies linguistic patterns supported by theory at the syntax-semantics interface.

Demonstrates successful generalization across 8 languages.

Abstract

While numerous attempts have been made to jointly parse syntax and semantics, high performance in one domain typically comes at the price of performance in the other. This trade-off contradicts the large body of research focusing on the rich interactions at the syntax-semantics interface. We explore multiple model architectures which allow us to exploit the rich syntactic and semantic annotations contained in the Universal Decompositional Semantics (UDS) dataset, jointly parsing Universal Dependencies and UDS to obtain state-of-the-art results in both formalisms. We analyze the behaviour of a joint model of syntax and semantics, finding patterns supported by linguistic theory at the syntax-semantics interface. We then investigate to what degree joint modeling generalizes to a multilingual setting, where we find similar trends across 8 languages.