Enabling computers to comprehend the intent of human actions by processing language is one of the fundamental goals of Natural Language Understanding. 
 An emerging task in this context is that of free-form event process typing, which aims at understanding the overall goal of a protagonist in terms of an action and an object, given a sequence of events.
 This task was initially treated as a learning-to-rank problem by exploiting the similarity between processes and action/object textual definitions. 
 However, this approach appears to be overly complex, binds the output types to a fixed inventory for possible word definitions and, moreover, leaves space for further enhancements as regards performance.
 In this paper, we advance the field by reformulating the free-form event process typing task as a sequence generation problem and put forward STEPS, an end-to-end approach for producing user intent in terms of actions and objects only, dispensing with the need for their definitions.
 In addition to this, we eliminate several dataset constraints set by previous works, while at the same time significantly outperforming them. 
 We release the data and software at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/steps.

STEPS: Semantic Typing of Event Processes with a Sequence-to-Sequence Approach

Conceptual representations of meaning have long been the general focus of Artificial Intelligence (AI) towards the fundamental goal of machine understanding, with innumerable efforts made in Knowledge Representation, Speech and Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, inter alia. Even today, at the core of Natural Language Understanding lies the task of Semantic Parsing, the objective of which is to convert natural sentences into machine-readable representations. Through this paper, we aim to revamp the historical dream of AI, by putting forward a novel, all-embracing, fully semantic meaning representation, that goes beyond the many existing formalisms. Indeed, we tackle their key limits by fully abstracting text into meaning and introducing language-independent concepts and semantic relations, in order to obtain an interlingual representation. Our proposal aims to overcome the language barrier, and connect not only texts across languages, but also images, videos, speech and sound, and logical formulas, across many fields of AI.

BMR: A Fully Semantic Meaning Representation to Overcome Language Barriers

With the advent of contextualized embeddings, attention towards neural ranking approaches for Information Retrieval increased considerably. However, two aspects have remained largely neglected: i) queries usually consist of few keywords only, which increases ambiguity and makes their contextualization harder, and ii) performing neural ranking on non-English documents is still cumbersome due to shortage of labeled datasets. In this paper we present SIR (Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval) to mitigate both problems by leveraging word sense information. At the core of our approach lies a novel multilingual query expansion mechanism based on Word Sense Disambiguation that provides sense definitions as additional semantic information for the query. Importantly, we use senses as a bridge across languages, thus allowing our model to perform considerably better than its supervised and unsupervised alternatives across French, German, Italian and Spanish languages on several CLEF benchmarks, while being trained on English Robust04 data only.

IR like a SIR: Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval for Multiple Languages

In this paper we present SPRING Online Services, a Web interface and RESTful APIs
for our state-of-the-art AMR parsing and generation system, SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). 
The Web interface has been developed to be easily used by the Natural Language Processing community, as well as by the general public. 
It provides, among other things, a highly interactive visualization platform and a feedback mechanism to obtain user suggestions for further improvements of the system's output. 
Moreover, our RESTful APIs enable easy integration of SPRING in downstream applications where AMR structures are needed.
Finally, we make SPRING Online Services freely available at http://nlp.uniroma1.it/spring and, in addition, we release extra model checkpoints to be used with the original SPRING Python code.

SPRING Goes Online: End-to-End AMR Parsing and Generation

In Text-to-AMR parsing, current state-of-the-art semantic parsers use cumbersome pipelines integrating several different modules or components, and exploit graph recategorization, i.e., a set of content-specific heuristics that are developed on the basis of the training set. However, the generalizability of graph recategorization in an out-of-distribution setting is unclear. In contrast, state-of-the-art AMR-to-Text generation, which can be seen as the inverse to parsing, is based on simpler seq2seq. In this paper, we cast Text-to-AMR and AMR-to-Text as a symmetric transduction task and show that by devising a careful graph linearization and extending a pretrained encoder-decoder model, it is possible to obtain state-of-the-art performances in both tasks using the very same seq2seq approach, i.e., SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). Our model does not require complex pipelines, nor heuristics built on heavy assumptions. In fact, we drop the need for graph recategorization, showing that this technique is actually harmful outside of the standard benchmark. Finally, we outperform the previous state of the art on the English AMR 2.0 dataset by a large margin: on Text-to-AMR we obtain an improvement of 3.6 Smatch points, while on AMR-to-Text we outperform the state of the art by 11.2 BLEU points. 
We release the software at github.com/SapienzaNLP/spring.

One SPRING to Rule Them Both: Symmetric AMR Semantic Parsing and Generation without a Complex Pipeline

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2F: Information Retrieval and Text Mining

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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STEPS: Semantic Typing of Event Processes with a Sequence-to-Sequence Approach

BMR: A Fully Semantic Meaning Representation to Overcome Language Barriers

IR like a SIR: Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval for Multiple Languages

IR like a SIR: Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval for Multiple Languages

SPRING Goes Online: End-to-End AMR Parsing and Generation

IR like a SIR: Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval for Multiple Languages

One SPRING to Rule Them Both: Symmetric AMR Semantic Parsing and Generation without a Complex Pipeline

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