Semantic construction with graph grammars

We introduce s-graph grammars, a new grammar formalism for computing graph-based semantic representations. Semantically annotated corpora which use graphs as semantic representations have recently become available, and there have been a number of data-driven systems for semantic parsing that can be trained on these corpora. However, it is hard to map the linguistic assumptions of these systems onto more classical insights on semantic construction. S-graph grammars use graphs as semantic representations, in a way that is consistent with more classical views on semantic construction. We illustrate this with a number of hand-written toy grammars, sketch the use of s-graph grammars for data-driven semantic parsing, and discuss formal aspects.