Nodes in Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) are generally thought of as neo-Davidsonian entities. We review existing translation into neo-Davidsonian representations and show that these translations inconsistently handle copula sentences. We link the problem to an asymmetry arising from a problematic handling of words with no associated PropBank frames for the underlying predicate. We introduce a method to automatically and uniformly decompose AMR nodes into an entity-part and a predicative part, which offers a consistent treatment of copula sentences and quasi- predicates such as brother or client.

When learned without exploration, local models for structured prediction tasks are subject to exposure bias and cannot be trained without detailed guidance. Active Imitation Learning (AIL), also known in NLP as Dynamic Oracle Learning, is a general technique for working around these issues by allowing the exploration of different outputs at training time. AIL requires oracle feedback: an oracle is any algorithm which can, given a partial candidate solution and gold annotation, find the correct (minimum loss) next output to produce. This paper describes a general finite state technique for deriving oracles. The technique describe is also efficient and will greatly expand the tasks for which AIL can be used.

We investigate the capacity of mechanisms for compositional semantic parsing to describe relations between sentences and semantic representations. We prove that in order to represent certain relations, mechanisms which are syntactically projective must be able to remember an unbounded number of locations in the semantic representations, where nonprojective mechanisms need not. This is the first result of this kind, and has consequences both for grammar-based and for neural systems.