Is the Stanford Dependency Representation Semantic?

Abstract

The Stanford Dependencies are a deep syntactic representation that are widely used for semantic tasks, like Recognizing Textual Entailment. But do they capture all of the semantic information a meaning representation ought to convey? This paper explores this question by investigating the feasibility of mapping Stanford dependency parses to Hobbsian Logical Form, a practical, event-theoretic semantic representation, using only a set of deterministic rules. Although we find that such a mapping is possible in a large number of cases, we also find cases for which such a mapping seems to require information beyond what the Stanford Dependencies encode. These cases shed light on the kinds of semantic information that are and are not present in the Stanford Dependencies.