Summary of the paper
| Title | Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nianwen Xue, Ondrej Bojar, Jan Hajic, Martha Palmer, Zdenka Uresova and Xiuhong Zhang |
| Abstract | Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) are rooted, directional and labeled graphs that abstract away from morpho-syntactic idiosyncrasies such as word category (verbs and nouns), word order, and function words (determiners, some prepositions). Because these syntactic idiosyncrasies account for many of the cross-lingual differences, it would be interesting to see if this representation can serve, e.g., as a useful, minimally divergent transfer layer in machine translation. To answer this question, we have translated 100 English sentences that have existing AMRs into Chinese and Czech to create AMRs for them. A cross-linguistic comparison of English to Chinese and Czech AMRs reveals both cases where the AMRs for the language pairs align well structurally and cases of linguistic divergence. We found that the level of compatibility of AMR between English and Chinese is higher than between English and Czech. We believe this kind of comparison is beneficial to further refining the annotation standards for each of the three languages and will lead to more compatible annotation guidelines between the languages. |
| Topics | Semantics, Multilinguality |
Full paper  |
Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech |
| Bibtex | @InProceedings{XUE14.384, author = {Nianwen Xue and Ondrej Bojar and Jan Hajic and Martha Palmer and Zdenka Uresova and Xiuhong Zhang}, title = {Not an Interlingua, But Close: Comparison of English AMRs to Chinese and Czech}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)}, year = {2014}, month = {may}, date = {26-31}, address = {Reykjavik, Iceland}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Hrafn Loftsson and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-8-4}, language = {english} } |