Semantic Parsing for English as a Second Language

This paper is concerned with semantic parsing for English as a second language (ESL). Motivated by the theoretical emphasis on the learning challenges that occur at the syntaxsemantics interface during second language acquisition, we formulate the task based on the divergence between literal and intended meanings. We combine the complementary strengths of English Resource Grammar, a linguistically-precise hand-crafted deep grammar, and TLE, an existing manually annotated ESL UD-TreeBank with a novel reranking model. Experiments demonstrate that in comparison to human annotations, our method can obtain a very promising SemBanking quality. By means of the newly created corpus, we evaluate state-of-the-art semantic parsing as well as grammatical error correction models. The evaluation profiles the performance of neural NLP techniques for handling ESL data and suggests some research directions.