Resources for Building Applications with Dependency Minimal Recursion Semantics

We describe resources aimed at increasing the usability of the semantic representations utilized within the DELPH-IN (Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG) consortium. We concentrate in particular on the Dependency Minimal Recursion Semantics (DMRS) formalism, a graph-based representation designed for compositional semantic representation with deep grammars. Our main focus is on English, and specifically English Resource Semantics (ERS) as used in the English Resource Grammar. We first give an introduction to ERS and DMRS and a brief overview of some existing resources and then describe in detail a new repository which has been developed to simplify the use of ERS/DMRS. We explain a number of operations on DMRS graphs which our repository supports, with sketches of the algorithms, and illustrate how these operations can be exploited in application building. We believe that this work will aid researchers to exploit the rich and effective but complex DELPH-IN resources.