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Masters Defense
12/9/2013 10:00 am
CBIM Multipurpose Room ( Room 22 )

Semantic Parsing using Lexicalized Well-Founded Grammars

Gaurav Kharkwal, Rutgers University

Defense Committee: Matthew Stone (Chair), Smaranda Muresan and Alex Borgida

Abstract

Research in semantic parsing has focused on developing computational systems capable of simultaneously performing syntactic, i.e. structural, and semantic, i.e., meaning-based, analyses of given sentences.  We present an implementation of a semantic parsing system using a constraint-based grammatical formalism called Lexicalized Well-Founded Grammars (LWFGs).  LWFGs are a type of Definite Clause Grammars, and use an ontology-based framework to represent syntactico-semantic information in the form of compositional and interpretation constraints. What makes LWFGs particularly interesting is the fact that these are the only constraint-based grammars that are provably learnable.  Previous work implemented semantic parsers using Prolog, a declarative language, which is slow and does not allow for an easy extension to a stochastic parsing framework.  Our implementation utilizes Python’s Natural Language Toolkit which not only allows us to easily interface our work with the natural language processing community, but also allows for a future possibility of extending the parser to support broad-coverage and stochastic parsing.