Copenhagen-Malmö: Tree Approximations of Semantic Parsing Problems

In this shared task paper for SemEval2014 Task 8, we show that most semantic structures can be approximated by trees through a series of almost bijective graph transformations. We transform input graphs, apply off-the-shelf methods from syntactic parsing on the resulting trees, and retrieve output graphs. Using tree approximations, we obtain good results across three semantic formalisms, with a 15.9% error reduction over a stateof-the-art semantic role labeling system on development data. Our system came in 3/6 in the shared task closed track.