Friday 3rd October 2025 - 11am Speaker: Professor Johan Bos (Computational Semantics, University of Groningen)Title: Neural Semantic Parsing with Extremely Rich Symbolic Meaning Representations Abstract: Current open-domain neural semantics parsers show impressive performance. However, closer inspection of the symbolic meaning representations they produce reveals significant weaknesses: Sometimes they tend to merely copy character sequences from the source text to form symbolic concepts, defaulting to the most frequent word sense based in the training distribution. By leveraging the hierarchical structure of a lexical ontology, we introduce a novel compositional symbolic representation for concepts based on their position in the taxonomical hierarchy. This representation provides richer semantic information and enhances interpretability. We introduce a neural “taxonomical” semantic parser to utilize this new representation system of predicates, and compare it with a standard neural semantic parser trained on the traditional meaning representation format, employing a novel challenge set and evaluation metric for evaluation. Is this taxonomical model, trained on much richer and complex meaning representations, better than the traditional model using the standard metrics for evaluation, and is able to learn the taxonomical hierarchy?Biography: Johan Bos is Professor of Computational Semantics at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). He received his doctorate from the Computational Linguistics Department at the University of the Saarland (Germany) and held post-doc positions at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and the La Sapienza University in Rome (Italy). In 2010 he moved to his current position in Groningen, leading the computational semantics group. Bos is the developer of Boxer, a state-of-the-art wide-coverage semantic parser for English, inventor of Wordrobe, a game with a purpose for semantic annotation, and initiator of the Parallel Meaning Bank, a large semantically-annotated corpus of detailed meaning representations for English, German, Dutch and Italian sentences (http://pmb.let.rug.nl). Oct 03 2025 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 3rd October 2025 - 11am Speaker: Johan Bos (University of Groningen) IF, G.03
Friday 3rd October 2025 - 11am Speaker: Professor Johan Bos (Computational Semantics, University of Groningen)Title: Neural Semantic Parsing with Extremely Rich Symbolic Meaning Representations Abstract: Current open-domain neural semantics parsers show impressive performance. However, closer inspection of the symbolic meaning representations they produce reveals significant weaknesses: Sometimes they tend to merely copy character sequences from the source text to form symbolic concepts, defaulting to the most frequent word sense based in the training distribution. By leveraging the hierarchical structure of a lexical ontology, we introduce a novel compositional symbolic representation for concepts based on their position in the taxonomical hierarchy. This representation provides richer semantic information and enhances interpretability. We introduce a neural “taxonomical” semantic parser to utilize this new representation system of predicates, and compare it with a standard neural semantic parser trained on the traditional meaning representation format, employing a novel challenge set and evaluation metric for evaluation. Is this taxonomical model, trained on much richer and complex meaning representations, better than the traditional model using the standard metrics for evaluation, and is able to learn the taxonomical hierarchy?Biography: Johan Bos is Professor of Computational Semantics at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). He received his doctorate from the Computational Linguistics Department at the University of the Saarland (Germany) and held post-doc positions at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and the La Sapienza University in Rome (Italy). In 2010 he moved to his current position in Groningen, leading the computational semantics group. Bos is the developer of Boxer, a state-of-the-art wide-coverage semantic parser for English, inventor of Wordrobe, a game with a purpose for semantic annotation, and initiator of the Parallel Meaning Bank, a large semantically-annotated corpus of detailed meaning representations for English, German, Dutch and Italian sentences (http://pmb.let.rug.nl). Oct 03 2025 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 3rd October 2025 - 11am Speaker: Johan Bos (University of Groningen) IF, G.03
Oct 03 2025 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 3rd October 2025 - 11am Speaker: Johan Bos (University of Groningen)
