Supervised Syntax-based Alignment between English Sentences and Abstract Meaning Representation Graphs

Abstract

As alignment links are not given between English sentences and Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs in the AMR annotation, automatic alignment becomes indispensable for training an AMR parser. Previous studies formalize it as a string-to-string problem and solve it in an unsupervised way, which suffers from data sparseness due to the small size of training data for English-AMR alignment. In this paper, we formalize it as a syntax-based alignment problem and solve it in a supervised manner based on syntax trees, which can address the data sparseness problem by generalizing English-AMR tokens to syntax tags. Experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed method not only for English-AMR alignment, but also for AMR parsing.