Mark-Matthias Zymla


2026

Situations of ambiguity and uncertainty in the annotation of discourse interpretation tasks, such as anaphoric reference, are common, but existing annotation tools typically only support visualization at the local level (i.e., visualizing more than one mention of a possible antecedent) rather than globally (i.e., visualizing multiple coreference chains), as the latter is a complex problem. In this paper, we introduce the interactive visual analysis tool AmbiCoRefVis, developed to display multiple global interpretations of a referring expression. We evaluate it with the Phrase Detectives corpus.
We present a platform for developing compositional semantic annotations for formal syntactic representations that allows users to interact with and explore annotations and to track their progress and quality. For this, we provide several forms of visualizations and take inspiration from research in linguistic treebanking. Thus, we contribute to the development of formal semantic parsers and corresponding meaning banks. The system is designed with a regression testing paradigm in mind and provides support for NLI so that the created semantic resources can be developed and validated in a task-driven environment. We defend this paradigm in comparison to modern approaches to semantic parsing that are mainly evaluated on the basis of gold standard annotations.

2025

This paper introduces a suite of computational semantic tools for Glue Semantics, an approach to compositionality developed in the context of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), but applicable to a variety of syntactic representations, including Universal Dependencies (UD). The three tools are: 1) a Glue Semantics prover, 2) an interface between this prover and a platform for implementing LFG grammars, and 3) a system to rewrite and add semantic annotations to LFG and UD syntactic analyses, with a native support for the prover. The main use of these tools is computational verification of theoretical linguistic analyses, but they have also been used for teaching formal semantic concepts.
This paper presents a computational resource for exploring semantic parsing and reasoning through a strictly formal lense. Inspired by the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar, our system allows for modular exploration of different aspects of semantic parsing. It consists of a hand-coded formal grammar combining syntactic and semantic annotations, producing basic semantic representations. The system provides the option to extend these basic semantics via rewrite rules in a principled fashion to explore more complex reasoning. The result is a layered system enabling an incremental approach to semantic parsing. We illustrate this approach with examples from the Fracas testsuite demonstrating its overall functionality and viability.

2018

2017