Cross-lingual Semantic Representation for NLP with UCCA: Tutorial at COLING 2020

Omri Abend, Dotan Dvir, Daniel Hershcovich, Jakob Prange and Nathan Schneider

This is an introductory tutorial to UCCA (Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation), a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, with corpora annotated in English, German and French, and ongoing annotation in Russian and Hebrew. UCCA builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. The tutorial provides a detailed introduction to the UCCA annotation guidelines, design philosophy and the available resources; and a comparison to other meaning representations. It also surveys the existing parsing work, including the findings of three recent shared tasks, in SemEval and CoNLL, that addressed UCCA parsing. Finally, the tutorial presents recent applications and extensions to the scheme, demonstrating its value for natural language processing in a range of languages and domains.

The tutorial was presented at COLING 2020. All contents are available in this repository, including the abstract, slides and recorded presentations.

Contents

1. A Bird's Eye View (Omri Abend): slides • video 1.1, video 1.2, video 1.3 (mp4)
2. Annotation of English (Nathan Schneider): slides • video (mp4)
3. Annotated Corpora and UCCA-App (Dotan Dvir): slides • video (mp4)
4. Extension Layers and Comparison to Other Formalisms (Jakob Prange): slides • video (mp4)
5. Parsing, Evaluation and Applications (Daniel Hershcovich): slides • video (mp4)
6. Cross-linguistic Studies (Omri Abend): slides • video (mp4)

The tutorial is also on the ACL Anthology. To cite it, please use:

@inproceedings{abend-etal-2020-cross,
    title = "Cross-lingual Semantic Representation for {NLP} with {UCCA}",
    author = "Abend, Omri  and
      Dvir, Dotan  and
      Hershcovich, Daniel  and
      Prange, Jakob  and
      Schneider, Nathan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts",
    month = dec,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
    publisher = "International Committee for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.coling-tutorials.1",
    pages = "1--9",
    abstract = "This is an introductory tutorial to UCCA (Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation), a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, with corpora annotated in English, German and French, and ongoing annotation in Russian and Hebrew. UCCA builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. The tutorial will provide a detailed introduction to the UCCA annotation guidelines, design philosophy and the available resources; and a comparison to other meaning representations. It will also survey the existing parsing work, including the findings of three recent shared tasks, in SemEval and CoNLL, that addressed UCCA parsing. Finally, the tutorial will present recent applications and extensions to the scheme, demonstrating its value for natural language processing in a range of languages and domains.",
}