We present the first parser for UCCA, a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, which builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. UCCA poses a challenge for existing parsing techniques, as it exhibits reentrancy (resulting in DAG structures), discontinuous structures and non-terminal nodes corresponding to complex semantic units. To our knowledge, the conjunction of these formal properties is not supported by any existing parser. Our transition-based parser, which uses a novel transition set and features based on bidirectional LSTMs, has value not just for UCCA parsing: its ability to handle more general graph structures can inform the development of parsers for other semantic DAG structures, and in languages that frequently use discontinuous structures.

The ability to consolidate information of different types is at the core of intelligence, and has tremendous practical value in allowing learning for one task to benefit from generalizations learned for others. In this paper we tackle the challenging task of improving semantic parsing performance, taking UCCA parsing as a test case, and AMR, SDP and Universal Dependencies (UD) parsing as auxiliary tasks. We experiment on three languages, using a uniform transition-based system and learning architecture for all parsing tasks. Despite notable conceptual, formal and domain differences, we show that multitask learning significantly improves UCCA parsing in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Our code is publicly available. 1

We present a novel word level vector representation based on symmetric patterns (SPs). For this aim we automatically acquire SPs (e.g., "X and Y") from a large corpus of plain text, and generate vectors where each coordinate represents the cooccurrence in SPs of the represented word with another word of the vocabulary. Our representation has three advantages over existing alternatives: First, being based on symmetric word relationships, it is highly suitable for word similarity prediction. Particularly, on the SimLex999 word similarity dataset, our model achieves a Spearman's ρ score of 0.517, compared to 0.462 of the state-of-the-art word2vec model. Interestingly, our model performs exceptionally well on verbs, outperforming stateof-the-art baselines by 20.2-41.5%. Second, pattern features can be adapted to the needs of a target NLP application. For example, we show that we can easily control whether the embeddings derived from SPs deem antonym pairs (e.g. (big,small)) as similar or dissimilar, an important distinction for tasks such as word classification and sentiment analysis. Finally, we show that a simple combination of the word similarity scores generated by our method and by word2vec results in a superior predictive power over that of each individual model, scoring as high as 0.563 in Spearman's ρ on SimLex999. This emphasizes the differences between the signals captured by each of the models.

BLEU is widely considered to be an informative metric for text-to-text generation, including Text Simplification (TS). TS includes both lexical and structural aspects. In this paper we show that BLEU is not suitable for the evaluation of sentence splitting, the major structural simplification operation. We manually compiled a sentence splitting gold standard corpus containing multiple structural paraphrases, and performed a correlation analysis with human judgments. 1 We find low or no correlation between BLEU and the grammaticality and meaning preservation parameters where sentence splitting is involved. Moreover, BLEU often negatively correlates with simplicity, essentially penalizing simpler sentences.

We present a novel approach for discovering word categories, sets of words sharing a significant aspect of their meaning. We utilize meta-patterns of highfrequency words and content words in order to discover pattern candidates. Symmetric patterns are then identified using graph-based measures, and word categories are created based on graph clique sets. Our method is the first pattern-based method that requires no corpus annotation or manually provided seed patterns or words. We evaluate our algorithm on very large corpora in two languages, using both human judgments and WordNetbased evaluation. Our fully unsupervised results are superior to previous work that used a POS tagged corpus, and computation time for huge corpora are orders of magnitude faster than previously reported.