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Abstract Meaning Representation of Constructions: The More We Include, the Better the Representation

We describe the expansion of the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) project to provide coverage for the annotation of certain types of constructions. Past AMR annotations generally followed a practice of assigning the semantic roles associated with an individual lexical item, as opposed to a flexible pattern or template of multiple lexical items, which characterizes constructions such as ‘The X-er, The Y-er’ (exemplified in the title). Furthermore, a goal of AMR is to provide consistent semantic representation despite language-specific syntactic idiosyncracies. Thus, representing the meanings associated with fully syntactic patterns required a novel annotation approach. As one strategy in our approach, we expanded the AMR lexicon of predicate senses, or semantic ‘rolesets,’ to include entries for a growing set of constructions. Despite the challenging practical and theoretical questions encountered, the additions and updates to AMR annotation described here ensure more comprehensive semantic representations capturing both lexical and constructional meaning.