Learning a Lexicon for Broad-Coverage Semantic Parsing

While there has been significant recent work on learning semantic parsers for specific task/ domains, the results don’t transfer from one domain to another domains. We describe a project to learn a broad-coverage semantic lexicon for domain independent semantic parsing. The technique involves several bootstrapping steps starting from a semantic parser based on a modest-sized hand-built semantic lexicon. We demonstrate that the approach shows promise in building a semantic lexicon on the scale of WordNet, with more coverage and detail that currently available in widely-used resources such as VerbNet. We view having such a lexicon as a necessary prerequisite for any attempt at attaining broad-coverage semantic parsing in any domain. The approach we described applies to all word classes, but in this paper we focus here on verbs, which are the most critical phenomena facing semantic parsing.