# Content Differences in Syntactic and Semantic Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06494 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06494/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10952/) (2021)
- [Great Service! Fine-grained Parsing of Implicit Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02561/) (2021)
- [Meaning Representation of Numeric Fused-Heads in UCCA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07364/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Relation Classification with Graph Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09772/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Syntactic analysis plays an important role in semantic parsing, but the nature of this role remains a topic of ongoing debate. The debate has been constrained by the scarcity of empirical comparative studies between syntactic and semantic schemes, which hinders the development of parsing methods informed by the details of target schemes and constructions. We target this gap, and take Universal Dependencies (UD) and UCCA as a test case. After abstracting away from differences of convention or formalism, we find that most content divergences can be ascribed to: (1) UCCA's distinction between a Scene and a non-Scene; (2) UCCA's distinction between primary relations, secondary ones and participants; (3) different treatment of multi-word expressions, and (4) different treatment of inter-clause linkage. We further discuss the long tail of cases where the two schemes take markedly different approaches. Finally, we show that the proposed comparison methodology can be used for fine-grained evaluation of UCCA parsing, highlighting both challenges and potential sources for improvement. The substantial differences between the schemes suggest that semantic parsers are likely to benefit downstream text understanding applications beyond their syntactic counterparts.