In this paper, we present AnCast, an intuitive and efficient tool for evaluating graph-based meaning representations (MR). AnCast implements evaluation metrics that are well understood in the NLP community, and they include concept F1, unlabeled relation F1, labeled relation F1, and weighted relation F1. The efficiency of the tool comes from a novel anchor broadcast alignment algorithm that is not subject to the trappings of local maxima. We show through experimental results that the AnCast score is highly correlated with the widely used Smatch score, but its computation takes only about 40% the time.

This paper reports the first release of the UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) data set. UMR is a graph-based meaning representation formalism consisting of a sentence-level graph and a document-level graph. The sentence-level graph represents predicate-argument structures, named entities, word senses, aspectuality of events, as well as person and number information for entities. The document-level graph represents coreferential, temporal, and modal relations that go beyond sentence boundaries. UMR is designed to capture the commonalities and variations across languages and this is done through the use of a common set of abstract concepts, relations, and attributes as well as concrete concepts derived from words from invidual languages. This UMR release includes annotations for six languages (Arapaho, Chinese, English, Kukama, Navajo, Sanapana) that vary greatly in terms of their linguistic properties and resource availability. We also describe on-going efforts to enlarge this data set and extend it to other genres and modalities. We also briefly describe the available infrastructure (UMR annotation guidelines and tools) that others can use to create similar data sets.

Rooted in AMR, Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a graph-based formalism with nodes as concepts and edges as relations between them. When used to represent natural language semantics, UMR maps words in a sentence to concepts in the UMR graph. Multiword expressions (MWEs) pose a particular challenge to UMR annotation because they deviate from the default one-to-one mapping between words and concepts. There are different types of MWEs which require different kinds of annotation that must be specified in guidelines. This paper discusses the specific treatment for each type of MWE in UMR.

This paper discusses the challenges of annotating the predicate-argument structure of Chinese verb compounds in Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a recent meaning representation framework that extends Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to cross-linguistic settings. The key issue is to decide whether to annotate the argument structure of a verb compound as a whole, or to annotate the argument structure of their component verbs as well as the relations between them. We examine different types of Chinese verb compounds, and propose how to annotate them based on the principle of compositionality, level of grammaticalization, and productivity of component verbs. We propose a solution to the practical problem of having to define the semantic roles for Chinese verb compounds that are quite open-ended by separating compositional verb compounds from verb compounds that are non-compositional or have grammaticalized verb components. For compositional verb compounds, instead of annotating the argument structure of the verb compound as a whole, we annotate the argument structure of the component verbs as well as the semantic relations between them as creating an exhaustive list of such verb compounds is infeasible. Verb compounds with grammaticalized verb components also tend to be productive and we represent grammaticalized verb compounds as either attributes of the primary verb or as relations.