Siyana Pavlova, PhD student in the Sémagramme team, will defend her thesis on Monday, 23rd June at 2pm in room A008.

Her thesis is entitled “Toward Scalable Semantic Annotation: Bridging Readability and a Wide Range of Phenomena into a Layered Meaning Representation”.

Jury

Reviewers
– Nicholas Asher, IRIT, CNRS, Toulouse, France
– Marie Candito, Université Paris Cité & LLF, Paris, France

Examiners
– Claire Gardent, CNRS, LORIA, Nancy, France
– Lucia Donatelli, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
– Anette Frank, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany

Supervisors
– Maxime Amblard, LORIA, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France
– Bruno Guillaume, LORIA, Inria – Grand Est, Nancy, France

Abstract

This work is situated in the area of semantic modeling, which aims to represent the meaning of natural language in a machine-processable form. Various formalisms exist in this direction. Logic-based ones offer more expressivity, but are more complex to annotate and analyse by humans. The ones aimed at large-scale annotation are more abstract, but at the cost of expressivity. To address the question of what should be included in the design of meaning representations, we carry out a survey on existing formalisms across various semantic phenomena and semantically-oriented considerations. With these in mind, we join the trend for reconciling the logic-based view on semantics with the readability offered by more abstract representations by proposing a new formalism, which uses a layered approach to represent various phenomena. Finally, to address the relative lack of parallel data in the field, we explore rule-based graph transformation methods between formalisms.