Omri Abend (Hebrew University) “UCCA: A Computational Approach to Cross-Linguistic Semantic Representation”
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
USA
Abstract
Analyzing large volumes of text in various languages and mapping them into a representation that reflects content, rather than form, is one of the great challenges NLP must face. The talk will present UCCA(Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation), an approach to structural semantic representation that emphasizes cross-linguistic applicability and accessibility to non-expert annotators, which represents a step towards meeting this challenge. The first part of the talk will introduce the UCCA scheme and show how it provides a typologically motivated characterization of abstract semantic structure. The second part will discuss a transition-based approach to UCCA parsing, and experiments on leveraging annotated data in other formalisms (such as AMR and SDP) to improve UCCA parsing through multi-task learning. The talk will conclude with an overview of how UCCA is being applied to text-to-text generation tasks, such as machine translation and text simplification, and their evaluation.
