# A Transition-Based Directed Acyclic Graph Parser for UCCA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00552 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00552/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

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- [Great Service! Fine-grained Parsing of Implicit Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02561/) (2021)
- [Self-Attentive Constituency Parsing for UCCA-based Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00621/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Relation Classification with Graph Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09772/) (2023)
- [CEScore: Simple and Efficient Confidence Estimation Model for Evaluating Split and Rephrase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01356/) (2023)
- [SETUP: Sentence-level English-To-Uniform Meaning Representation Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07068/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first parser for UCCA, a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, which builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. UCCA poses a challenge for existing parsing techniques, as it exhibits reentrancy (resulting in DAG structures), discontinuous structures and non-terminal nodes corresponding to complex semantic units. To our knowledge, the conjunction of these formal properties is not supported by any existing parser. Our transition-based parser, which uses a novel transition set and features based on bidirectional LSTMs, has value not just for UCCA parsing: its ability to handle more general graph structures can inform the development of parsers for other semantic DAG structures, and in languages that frequently use discontinuous structures.