Unifying Semantic Relations Across Syntactic Levels

We construct a list of binary semantic relations that combines three lists recognized at different syntactic levels { multi-clause sentences, clauses, noun phrases. We identify relations that are the same at diierent levels and represent them in a level-independent way. We base our construction on the fact that many syntactic variants express the same idea, and a linguistic expression displaying a semantic relation at one level may be equivalently converted onto another level. Uniformity of representation allows a thorough text analysis, since the same relation can be recognized in many forms. A system trained to assign relations automatically will allow subsequent analysis of more complex semantic structures.