Transforming Dependency Structures to Logical Forms for Semantic Parsing

Abstract

The strongly typed syntax of grammar formalisms such as CCG, TAG, LFG and HPSG offers a synchronous framework for deriving syntactic structures and semantic logical forms.  In contrast---partly due to the lack of a strong type system---dependency structures are easy to annotate and have become a widely used form of syntactic analysis for many languages.  However, the lack of a type system makes a formal mechanism for deriving logical forms from dependency structures challenging.  We address this by introducing a robust system based on the lambda calculus for deriving neo-Davidsonian logical forms from dependency trees. These logical forms are then used for semantic parsing of natural language to Freebase. Experiments on the Free917 and WebQuestions datasets show that our representation is superior to the original dependency trees and that it outperforms a CCG-based representation on this task. Compared to prior work, we obtain the strongest result to date on Free917 and competitive results on WebQuestions.