Evaluating Structural and Linguistic Quality in Urdu DRS Parsing and Generation through Bidirectional Evaluation

Muhammad Saad Amin, Luca Anselma, Alessandro Mazzei


Abstract
Evaluating Discourse Representation Structure (DRS)-based systems for semantic parsing (Text-to-DRS) and generation (DRS-to-Text) poses unique challenges, particularly in low-resource languages like Urdu. Traditional metrics often fall short, focusing either on structural accuracy or linguistic quality, but rarely capturing both. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary evaluation methodologies—Parse-Generate (PARS-GEN) and Generate-Parse (GEN-PARS)—designed for a more comprehensive assessment of DRS-based systems. PARS-GEN evaluates the parsing process by converting DRS outputs back to the text, revealing linguistic nuances often missed by structure-focused metrics like SMATCH. Conversely, GEN-PARS assesses text generation by converting generated text into DRS, providing a semantic perspective that complements surface-level metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and BERTScore. Using the Parallel Meaning Bank (PMB) dataset, we demonstrate our methodology across Urdu, uncovering unique insights into Urdu’s structural and linguistic interplay. Findings show that traditional metrics frequently overlook the complexity of linguistic and semantic fidelity, especially in low-resource languages. Our dual approach offers a robust framework for evaluating DRS-based systems, enhancing semantic parsing and text generation quality.
Anthology ID:
2025.indonlp-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indo-Aryan and Dravidian Languages
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi
Editors:
Ruvan Weerasinghe, Isuri Anuradha, Deshan Sumanathilaka
Venues:
IndoNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.indonlp-1.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad Saad Amin, Luca Anselma, and Alessandro Mazzei. 2025. Evaluating Structural and Linguistic Quality in Urdu DRS Parsing and Generation through Bidirectional Evaluation. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indo-Aryan and Dravidian Languages, pages 33–43, Abu Dhabi. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Structural and Linguistic Quality in Urdu DRS Parsing and Generation through Bidirectional Evaluation (Amin et al., IndoNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.indonlp-1.4.pdf