No Arabic abstract
Syntactic and semantic parsing has been investigated for decades, which is one primary topic in the natural language processing community. This article aims for a brief survey on this topic. The parsing community includes many tasks, which are difficult to be covered fully. Here we focus on two of the most popular formalizations of parsing: constituent parsing and dependency parsing. Constituent parsing is majorly targeted to syntactic analysis, and dependency parsing can handle both syntactic and semantic analysis. This article briefly reviews the representative models of constituent parsing and dependency parsing, and also dependency graph parsing with rich semantics. Besides, we also review the closely-related topics such as cross-domain, cross-lingual and joint parsing models, parser application as well as corpus development of parsing in the article.
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.
A significant amount of information in todays world is stored in structured and semi-structured knowledge bases. Efficient and simple methods to query them are essential and must not be restricted to only those who have expertise in formal query languages. The field of semantic parsing deals with converting natural language utterances to logical forms that can be easily executed on a knowledge base. In this survey, we examine the various components of a semantic parsing system and discuss prominent work ranging from the initial rule based methods to the current neural approaches to program synthesis. We also discuss methods that operate using varying levels of supervision and highlight the key challenges involved in the learning of such systems.
We propose a novel in-order chart-based model for constituent parsing. Compared with previous CKY-style and top-down models, our model gains advantages from in-order traversal of a tree (rich features, lookahead information and high efficiency) and makes a better use of structural knowledge by encoding the history of decisions. Experiments on the Penn Treebank show that our model outperforms previous chart-based models and achieves competitive performance compared with other discriminative single models.
In this paper, we present an approach to improve the accuracy of a strong transition-based dependency parser by exploiting dependency language models that are extracted from a large parsed corpus. We integrated a small number of features based on the dependency language models into the parser. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluate our parser on standard English and Chinese data where the base parser could achieve competitive accuracy scores. Our enhanced parser achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on Chinese data and competitive results on English data. We gained a large absolute improvement of one point (UAS) on Chinese and 0.5 points for English.
Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into machine-readable meaning representations. Currently, most semantic parsing methods are not able to utilize contextual information (e.g. dialogue and comments history), which has a great potential to boost semantic parsing performance. To address this issue, context dependent semantic parsing has recently drawn a lot of attention. In this survey, we investigate progress on the methods for the context dependent semantic parsing, together with the current datasets and tasks. We then point out open problems and challenges for future research in this area. The collected resources for this topic are available at:https://github.com/zhuang-li/Contextual-Semantic-Parsing-Paper-List.