{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/content-differences-in-syntactic-and-semantic","title":"Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representations","arxiv_id":"1903.06494","date":"2019-03-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Daniel Hershcovich","Omri Abend","Ari Rappoport"],"abstract":"Syntactic analysis plays an important role in semantic parsing, but the\nnature of this role remains a topic of ongoing debate. The debate has been\nconstrained by the scarcity of empirical comparative studies between syntactic\nand semantic schemes, which hinders the development of parsing methods informed\nby the details of target schemes and constructions. We target this gap, and\ntake Universal Dependencies (UD) and UCCA as a test case. After abstracting\naway from differences of convention or formalism, we find that most content\ndivergences can be ascribed to: (1) UCCA's distinction between a Scene and a\nnon-Scene; (2) UCCA's distinction between primary relations, secondary ones and\nparticipants; (3) different treatment of multi-word expressions, and (4)\ndifferent treatment of inter-clause linkage. We further discuss the long tail\nof cases where the two schemes take markedly different approaches. Finally, we\nshow that the proposed comparison methodology can be used for fine-grained\nevaluation of UCCA parsing, highlighting both challenges and potential sources\nfor improvement. The substantial differences between the schemes suggest that\nsemantic parsers are likely to benefit downstream text understanding\napplications beyond their syntactic counterparts.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06494v5","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.06494v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"content-differences-in-syntactic-and-semantic","repo_url":"https://github.com/danielhers/synsem","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"semantic-parsing","task_name":"Semantic Parsing"},{"task_slug":"ucca-parsing","task_name":"UCCA Parsing"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1903.06494","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}