Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice

Chapter 4. Semantic Parsing

Sameer Pradhan

Semantics by its dictionary definition is the study of meaning, and parsing is the examination of something in a minute way, that is, identifying and relating the pieces of information being parsed. When we put the two of these concepts together, we get semantic parsing, which, in the broadest sense of the phrase, is the process of identifying meaning chunks contained in an information signal in an attempt to transform it into some data structure that can be manipulated by a computer to perform higher level tasks. In our case, the information signal is human language text. Unfortunately, in the natural language processing community, the term semantic parsing is somewhat ambiguous. Over the years researchers ...