Transforming syntactic graphs into semantic graphs

Abstract

In this paper, we present a computational method for transforming a syntactic graph, which represents all syntactic interpretations of a sentence, into a semantic graph which filters out certain interpretations, but also incorporates any remaining ambiguities. We argue that the resulting ambiguous graph, supported by an exclusion matrix, is a useful data structure for question answering and other semantic processing. Our research is based on the principle that ambiguity is an inherent aspect of natural language communication.