Towards a Compositional Typed Semantics using Universal Dependencies

  • Siva Reddy | Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, The University of Edinburgh

Universal Dependencies offer a homogeneous syntactic representation across languages fostering multilingual NLP research. However, dependency structures lack a transparent syntax-semantics interface like CCG, making it hard to derive target-application specific semantics in a synchronous compositional fashion. In this talk, I will introduce a typed-lambda calculus to derive neo-Davidsonian logical forms from universal dependencies. Experiments on Freebase semantic parsing in English, German and Spanish show that these logical forms are superior to the original dependency trees and outperform strong baselines (e.g., CCG for English on WebQuestions). In the second part of the talk, I will present resource-lean approaches for Freebase semantic parsing which achieve state-of-the-art results on WebQuestions.

Series: Microsoft Research Talks