News from Sapienza NLP

SapienzaNLP @ AAAI 2021

Semantic Parsing and Multlingual WSD

This year at AAAI our group will present 2 papers:
  • One SPRING to Rule Them Both: Symmetric AMR Semantic Parsing and Generation without a Complex Pipeline
  • XL-WSD: An Extra-Large and Cross-Lingual Evaluation Framework for Word Sense Disambiguation

One SPRING to Rule Them Both: Symmetric AMR Semantic Parsing and Generation without a Complex Pipeline

by Michele Bevilacqua, Rexhina Blloshmi and Roberto Navigli

In Text-to-AMR parsing, current state-of-the-art semantic parsers use cumbersome pipelines integrating several different modules or components, and exploit graph recategorization, i.e., a set of content-specific heuristics that are developed on the basis of the training set. However, the generalizability of graph recategorization in an out-of-distribution setting is unclear. In contrast, state-of-the-art AMR-to-Text generation, which can be seen as the inverse to parsing, is based on simpler seq2seq. In this paper, we cast Text-to-AMR and AMR-to-Text as a symmetric transduction task and show that by devising a careful graph linearization and extending a pretrained encoder-decoder model, it is possible to obtain state-of-the-art performances in both tasks using the very same seq2seq approach, i.e., SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). Our model does not require complex pipelines, nor heuristics built on heavy assumptions. In fact, we drop the need for graph recategorization, showing that this technique is actually harmful outside of the standard benchmark. Finally, we outperform the previous state of the art on the English AMR 2.0 dataset by a large margin: on Text-to-AMR we obtain an improvement of 3.6 Smatch points, while on AMR-to-Text we outperform the state of the art by 11.2 BLEU points.


XL-WSD: An Extra-Large and Cross-Lingual Evaluation Framework for Word Sense Disambiguation

by Tommaso Pasini, Alessandro Raganato and Roberto Navigli

Transformer-based architectures brought a breeze of change to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) improving models’ performances by a large margin. The fast development of new approaches has been further encouraged by a well-framed evaluation suite for English, which allowed to keep track and fairly compare their performances. However, other languages remained mostly unexplored as testing data are available for a few languages only and the evaluation setting is rather matted. In this paper, we untangle this situation by proposing XL-WSD, a cross-lingual evaluation benchmark for the WSD task featuring sense-annotated development and test sets in 18 languages from six different linguistic families, together with language-specific silver training data. We leverage XL-WSD datasets to conduct an extensive evaluation of neural and knowledge-based approaches, including the most recent multilingual language models. Results show that the zero-shot knowledge transfer across languages is a promising research direction within the WSD field, especially when considering low-resourced languages where large pretrained multilingual models still perform poorly.