Semantically Inspired AMR Alignment for the Portuguese Language

Meaning Representation (AMR) is a graph-based semantic formalism where the nodes are concepts and edges are relations among them. Most of AMR parsing methods require alignment between the nodes of the graph and the words of the sentence. However, this alignment is not provided by manual annotations and available automatic aligners focus only on the English language, not performing well for other languages. Aiming to fulfill this gap, we developed an alignment method for the Portuguese language based on a more semantically matched word-concept pair. We performed both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations and showed that our alignment approach outperforms the alignment strategies developed for English, improving AMR parsers, and achieving competitive results with a parser designed for the Portuguese language.