Semantic Normalisation : a Framework and an Experiment

We present a normalisation framework for linguistic representations and illustrate its use by normalising the Stanford Dependency graphs (SDs) produced by the Stanford parser into Labelled Stanford Dependency graphs (LSDs). The normalised representations are evaluated both on a testsuite of constructed examples and on free text. The resulting representations improve on standard Predicate/Argument structures produced by SRL by combining role labelling with the semantically oriented features of SDs. Furthermore, the proposed normalisation framework opens the way to stronger normalisation processes which should be useful in reducing the burden on inference.