AMR: Not semantics, but close (? maybe ???) by Hal Daumé.
From the post:
Okay, necessary warning. I’m not a semanticist. I’m not even a linguist. Last time I took semantics was twelve years ago (sigh.)
Like a lot of people, I’ve been excited about AMR (the “Abstract Meaning Representation”) recently. It’s hard not to get excited. Semantics is all the rage. And there are those crazy people out there who think you can cram meaning of a sentence into a !#$* vector [1], so the part of me that likes Language likes anything that has interesting structure and calls itself “Meaning.” I effluviated about AMR in the context of the (awesome) SemEval panel.
There is an LREC paper this year whose title is where I stole the title of this post from: Not an Interlingua, But Close: A Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech by Xue, Bojar, Hajič, Palmer, Urešová and Zhang. It’s a great introduction to AMR and you should read it (at least skim).
What I guess I’m interested in discussing is not the question of whether AMR is a good interlingua but whether it’s a semantic representation. Note that it doesn’t claim this: it’s not called ASR. But as semantics is the study of the relationship between signifiers and denotation,
[Edit: it’s a reasonable place to look; see Emily Bender’s comment.]it’s probably the closest we have.…
Deeply interesting work, particularly given the recent interest in Enhancing open data with identifiers. Be sure to read the comments to the post as well.
Who knew? Semantics are important!
😉
Topic maps take that a step further and capture your semantics, not necessarily the semantics of some expert unfamiliar with your domain.