Semantic Framework for Comparison Structures in Natural Language

Abstract

Comparison is one of the most important phenomena in language for expressing objective and subjective facts about various entities. Systems that can understand and reason over comparative structure can play a major role in the applications which require deeper understanding of language. In this paper we present a novel semantic framework for representing the meaning of comparative structures in natural language, which models comparisons as predicate-argument pairs interconnected with semantic roles. Our framework supports not only adjectival, but also adverbial, nominal, and verbal comparatives. With this paper, we provide a novel dataset of gold-standard comparison structures annotated according to our semantic framework.

Towards Broad-coverage Meaning Representation: The Case of Comparison Structures

“…The diversity and comprehensiveness of the comparison structures represented in our dataset is dependent on the genre of sentences comprising it. Earlier, we had experimented with annotating semantic structures on OntoNotes dataset (Bakhshandeh and Allen, 2015). Recently (Bakhshandeh et al, 2016), We have shifted our focus to actual product and restaurant reviews, which include many natural comparison instances.…”

“…The details of the Extreme type can be found in the earlier work (Bakhshandeh and Allen, 2015;Bakhshandeh et al, 2016).…”

LGPSolver - Solving Logic Grid Puzzles Automatically

“…Types are defined as '<' (smaller sign) and '>' (greater sign) in Prolog. We have gathered a list of comparative adjectives in English from curso-ingles 3 and with the help of Semantic Framework for comparison structures (Bakhshandeh and Allen, 2015), they are categorized as less type, more type, or none of them. In total, we acquired 41 comparative adjectives that are commonly used in LGPs.…”

Learning to Jointly Predict Ellipsis and Comparison Structures

“…The most recent work on the computational semantics of comparison (Bakhshandeh and Allen, 2015) sets the stage for a deeper semantic representation of comparisons. Bakshandeh and Allen introduce the first computational semantic frame-work for representing the meaning of comparatives in natural language.…”

“…Earlier work (Bakhshandeh and Allen, 2015) experimented with annotating semantic structures on OntoNotes dataset. We shift our focus to actual product and restaurant reviews, which inherently include many natural comparison instances.…”