Skip to main content

Extracting Semantic Roles from Ungrammatical Sentences

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Intelligent Systems and Applications (IntelliSys 2018)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 869))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 1777 Accesses

Abstract

Ungrammatical sentences present a challenge in a number of Natural Language Processing tasks, including those used in automatic Question Answering. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm that identifies the most likely decomposition of a (possibly ungrammatical) sentence into its semantic roles. The algorithm makes use of a chart parser - using a “tight” hybrid syntactic-semantic context-free grammar - that identifies whether each substring may play the role of either a main or a subordinate clause (like a declarative clause), or a semantic role like subject, predicate or complements. Then an Integer Programming Problem is solved in order to find a coverage of maximum likelihood. At this stage, the model tries to partition the sentence in substrings in such a way that: (a) each substring is assigned a clause (main or a secondary clause) and a semantic role; a measure of the overall likelihood is maximized. The validity of this approach has been assessed on a testset obtained by randomly perturbing a set of grammatical sentences of various nature.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Brockett, C., Dolan, W.B., Gamon, M.: Correcting ESL errors using phrasal SMT techniques. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pp. 249–256, Sydney (July 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Earley, J.: An efficient context-free parsing algorithm. Commun. ACM 13(2), 94–102 (1970)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Eeg-Olofsson, J., Knutsson, O.: Automatic grammar checking for second language learners - the use of prepositions. In: Proceedings of NoDaLida 2003

    Google Scholar 

  4. Foster, J., Çetinoglu, O., Wagner, J., Le Roux, J., Hogan, S., Nivre, J., Hogan, D., Van Genabith, J. et al.: #hardtoparse:POS tagging and parsing the twitterverse. In Proceedings of the Workshop On Analyzing Microtext (AAAI 2011), pp. 20–25 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Gildea, D.: Corpus variation and parser performance. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 167–202 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Goldberg, Y., Elhadad, M.: An efficient algorithm for easy-first non-directional dependency parsing. In: Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 742–750. Association for Computational Linguistics, Los Angeles, CA (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hashemi, H.B., Hwa, R.: Parse tree fragmentation of ungrammatical sentences. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-16), pp. 2796–2802, New York, NY, USA, 09–15 July 2016

    Google Scholar 

  8. Morgado da Costa, L., Bond, F., Xiaoling, H.: Syntactic well-formedness diagnosis and error-based coaching in computer assisted language learning using machine translation. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications, pp. 107-116, Osaka, Japan, 12 Dec 2016

    Google Scholar 

  9. Napoles, C., Cahill, A., Madnani, N.: The effect of multiple grammatical errors on processing non-native writing. In: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pp. 1–11, San Diego, CA, 16 June 2016

    Google Scholar 

  10. Napoles, C., Callison-Burch, C.: Systematically adapting machine translation for grammatical error correction. In: Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pp. 345–356, Copenhagen, Denmark, 8 Sep 2017

    Google Scholar 

  11. Petrov, S., Chang, P.-C., Ringgaard, M., Alshawi, H.: Uptraining for accurate deterministic question parsing. In: Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 705-713, MIT, MA, USA, 9–11 Oct 2010

    Google Scholar 

  12. Rozovskaya, A., Chang, K.-W., Sammons, M., Roth, D., Habash, N.: The Illinois-Columbia system in the CoNLL-2014 shared task. In: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning: Shared Task, pp. 34-42, Baltimore, Maryland, 26–27 July 2014

    Google Scholar 

  13. Rozovskaya, A., Roth, D.: Grammatical error correction: machine translation and classifiers. In: Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 2205–2215, Berlin, Germany, 07–12 Aug 2016

    Google Scholar 

  14. Sakaguchi, K., Post, M., Van Durme, B.: Error-repair dependency parsing for ungrammatical texts. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Short Papers), pp. 189-195 Vancouver, Canada, 30 July–4 Aug 2017

    Google Scholar 

  15. Tetreault, J., Chodorow, M.: Native judgments of non-native usage: experiments in preposition error detection. In: Coling 2008: Proceedings of the workshop on Human Judgements in Computational Linguistics, pp. 24–32 Manchester August 2008

    Google Scholar 

  16. Yuan, Z., Briscoe, T.: Grammatical error correction using neural machine translation. In: Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2016, pp. 380–386, San Diego, CA, 12–17 June 2016

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgment

This work was partly supported by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) of Italy. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gianpaolo Ghiani .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Ghiani, G., Guerrieri, A., Manni, A. (2019). Extracting Semantic Roles from Ungrammatical Sentences. In: Arai, K., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Applications. IntelliSys 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 869. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01057-7_91

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics