Generation of MRS Abstract Predicates from Paninian USR

Abstract

Semantic Representations become useful resources for various multilingual NLP applications such as Machine Translation, Multilingual Generation, cross Lingual QA, to name a few. No Semantic Representation, to our knowledge, adopts vivakṣā (Speaker’s intention) as a guiding principle for the representation. This motivates us to develop a new Semantic Representation system – Universal Semantic Representation (USR) – following Indian Grammatical Tradition (IGT) and Paninian grammar. Since USR is designed to be language-independent, we have currently taken up the task of generating English, Hindi, Tamil and Bangla from the USR. For English generation, the USR is mapped to ERG meaning representation (Flickinger, D. 1999) which is couched in Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). We use an off-the-shelf ACE generator that uses ERG as a resource-grammar for generating English. While designing the transfer module from USR to ERG-based MRS, we came across various Abstract Predicates (APs) in MRS representation as described in ErgSemantics_Basic (Flickinger et al., 2014). These APs are used to represent the semantic contribution of grammatical constructions or more specialized lexical entries such as compounding or the comparative use of more and so on. This paper presents the strategy for postulating the APs from the information given in USR and then reports the implementation of the transfer module keeping the focus on the postulation of APs. We get around 95% accuracy in postulating APs from USR.