Who Did What to Whom? A Contrastive Study of Syntacto-Semantic Dependencies.

We investigate aspects of interoperability between a broad range of common annotation schemes for syntacto-semantic dependencies. With the practical goal of making the LinGO Redwoods Treebank accessible to broader usage, we contrast seven distinct annotation schemes of functor--argument structure, both in terms of syntactic and semantic relations. Drawing examples from a multi-annotated gold standard, we show how abstractly similar information can take quite different forms across frameworks. We further seek to shed light on the representational 'distance' between pure bilexical dependencies, on the one hand, and full-blown logical-form propositional semantics, on the other hand. Furthermore, we propose a fully automated conversion procedure from (logical-form) meaning representation to bilexical semantic dependencies.