Fully-Semantic Parsing and Generation: the BabelNet Meaning Representation

A language-independent representation of meaning is one of the most coveted dreams in Natural Language Understanding. With this goal in mind, several formalisms have been proposed as frameworks for meaning representation in Semantic Parsing. And yet, the dependencies these formalisms share with respect to language-specific repositories of knowledge make the objective of closing the gap between high- and low-resourced languages hard to accomplish. In this paper, we present the BabelNet Meaning Representation (BMR), an interlingual formalism that abstracts away from language-specific constraints by taking advantage of the multilingual semantic resources of BabelNet and VerbAtlas. We describe the rationale behind the creation of BMR and put forward BMR 1.0, a dataset labeled entirely according to the new formalism. Moreover, we show how BMR is able to outperform previous formalisms thanks to its fully-semantic framing, which enables top-notch multilingual parsing and generation. We release the code at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/bmr.