- Alexander Hauptmann. 1999. Semantic Interpretation ((frame *move) (form Ques) (agent ((frame *human) (pro +) (number Sing) (person 2))) (object ((frame *body-part) (name *thumb) (possessive ((frame *human) (number Sg) (person 2) (pro +) ) 1) ) ). Abstract: The development of larger scale natural language systems has been hampered by the need to manually create mappings from syntactic structures into meaning representations. A new approach to semantic interpretation is proposed, which uses partial syntactic structures as the main unit of abstraction for interpretation rules. This approach can work for a variety of syntactic representations corresponding to directed acyclic graphs. It is designed to map into meaning representations based on frame hierarchies with inheritance. We define semantic interpretation rules in a compact format. The format is suitable for automatic rule extension or rule generalization, when existing hand-coded rules do not cover the current input. Furthermore, automatic discovery of semantic interpretation rules from input/output examples is made possible by this new rule format. The principles of the approach are validated in a comparison to other methods on a separately developed domain. Instead of relying purely on painstaking human effort, this paper combines human expertise with computer learning strategies to successfully overcome the bottleneck of semantic interpretation. Semantic Interpretation An important step in the language understanding process is constructing a representation of the meaning of a sentence, given the syntactic structure. Mapping from syntactic structures into a meaning representation is referred to as semantic interpretation or semantic mapping. To do this, we need a set of interpretation rules, which tell us how to create a meaning representation from the syntax representation. Creating semantic interpretations can be difficult for many reasons. Consider, for example, a machine translation system with N languages and M different domains. Each domain describes a distinct world of conversational topics and concepts. While we only need to write one syntactic grammar to understand each language and only one frame representation for each domain, we must write N * M different sets of semantic interpretation rules to interpret and map from each syntactic representation into ((FRAME *MOVE) (FORM QUES) (AGENT ((FRAME *HUMAN) (PRO +) (NUMBER SING) (PERSON 2))) (OBJECT ((FRAME *BODY-PART) (NAME *THUMB) (POSSESSIVE ((FRAME *HUMAN) (NUMBER SG) (PERSON 2)
