Towards an Encyclopedia of Compositional Semantics: Documenting the Interface of the English Resource Grammar

Dan Flickinger, Emily M. Bender, Stephan Oepen


Abstract
We motivate and describe the design and development of an emerging encyclopedia of compositional semantics, pursuing three objectives. We first seek to compile a comprehensive catalogue of interoperable semantic analyses, i.e., a precise characterization of meaning representations for a broad range of common semantic phenomena. Second, we operationalize the discovery of semantic phenomena and their definition in terms of what we call their semantic fingerprint, a formal account of the building blocks of meaning representation involved and their configuration. Third, we ground our work in a carefully constructed semantic test suite of minimal exemplars for each phenomenon, along with a ‘target’ fingerprint that enables automated regression testing. We work towards these objectives by codifying and documenting the body of knowledge that has been constructed in a long-term collaborative effort, the development of the LinGO English Resource Grammar. Documentation of its semantic interface is a prerequisite to use by non-experts of the grammar and the analyses it produces, but this effort also advances our own understanding of relevant interactions among phenomena, as well as of areas for future work in the grammar.
Anthology ID:
L14-1457
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
875–881
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/562_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dan Flickinger, Emily M. Bender, and Stephan Oepen. 2014. Towards an Encyclopedia of Compositional Semantics: Documenting the Interface of the English Resource Grammar. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 875–881, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Towards an Encyclopedia of Compositional Semantics: Documenting the Interface of the English Resource Grammar (Flickinger et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/562_Paper.pdf