The Parallel Meaning Bank: Towards a Multilingual Corpus of Translations Annotated with Compositional Meaning Representations

Abstract

The Parallel Meaning Bank is a corpus of translations annotated with shared, formal meaning representations comprising over 11 million words divided over four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch). Our approach is based on cross-lingual projection: automatically produced (and manually corrected) semantic annotations for English sentences are mapped onto their word-aligned translations, assuming that the translations are meaning-preserving. The semantic annotation consists of five main steps: (i) segmentation of the text in sentences and lexical items; (ii) syntactic parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar; (iii) universal semantic tagging; (iv) symbolization; and (v) compositional semantic analysis based on Discourse Representation Theory. These steps are performed using statistical models trained in a semi-supervised manner. The employed annotation models are all language-neutral. Our first results are promising.