A Discriminative Graph-Based Parser for the Abstract Meaning Representation

The Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic formalism for which a growing set of annotated examples is available. We introduce the first approach to parse sentences into this representation, providing a strong baseline for future improvement. The method is based on a novel algorithm for finding a maximum spanning, connected subgraph, embedded within a Lagrangian relaxation of an optimization problem that imposes linguistically inspired constraints. Our approach is described in the general framework of structured prediction, allowing future incorporation of additional features and constraints, and may extend to other formalisms as well. Our open-source system, JAMR, is available at: http://github.com/jflanigan/jamr