CxGr-AMR: Extending Abstract Meaning Representation Beyond Lexically Anchored Relations with Constructional Rolesets

Abstract

Current Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotation guidelines, which largely tie argument structure to lexical rolesets, systematically misrepresent cases in which key semantic roles stem from clause-level structure rather than the verb, leaving these meanings either unnaturally attached, incorrect, or unexpressed. To address this limitation, we present CxGr-AMR, a novel extension of AMR that captures the semantics of various types of phrasal constructions, including argument structure constructions. We first examine how such cases are handled under current Standard-AMR guidelines and show that these analyses are often inadequate when constructionally contributed roles clash with those assigned by the verb. We then provide a theoretical grounding for our CxGr-AMR rolesets that lay out the relationship between the syntactic signatures of constructional slots and particular semantic roles associated with them. Finally, we develop an annotation-expert-in-the-loop pipeline for the semi-automatic annotation of sentences, and release a dataset containing 355 instances of phrasal constructions annotated with both Standard and CxGr-AMR.

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