Unsupervised semantic parsing

  • Authors:
  • Hoifung Poon;Pedro Domingos

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • EMNLP '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Volume 1 - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We present the first unsupervised approach to the problem of learning a semantic parser, using Markov logic. Our USP system transforms dependency trees into quasi-logical forms, recursively induces lambda forms from these, and clusters them to abstract away syntactic variations of the same meaning. The MAP semantic parse of a sentence is obtained by recursively assigning its parts to lambda-form clusters and composing them. We evaluate our approach by using it to extract a knowledge base from biomedical abstracts and answer questions. USP substantially outperforms TextRunner, DIRT and an informed baseline on both precision and recall on this task.