Shalmaneser: A Shallow Semantic Parser

March 13, 2007: Release 1.1

New features:

Bugs removed
Support for TreeTagger for English POS tagging
English pre-trained classifiers for FrameNet 1.3

Note: Some people have reported the following error message:

                  
 parser: sentence.c:112: convert_sentence: Assertion `0' failed.

This error is not in Shalmaneser itself, but in the collaboration between POS tagger and parser. Apparently, newer versions of TreeTagger give more detailed POS tags (like IN/that instead of IN as POS tag for that), and the Collins parser can't deal with that. If you see this error, processing will have failed. Please Have a look at the file Pkg/TreetaggerInterface.rb, Method convert_to_collins(line). If it doesn't look like this, replace the existing code with this:

 def convert_to_collins(line)
    line.chomp!
    # if there are any slashes in the tag, just ignore them (and everything after them)    
    if line =~ /^(.+)\//
      line = $1
    end
    return line.gsub(/^PP/,"PRP").gsub(/^NP/,"NNP").gsub(/^VV/,"VB").gsub(/^VH/,"VB").gsub(/^SENT/,".+")
  end

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Description

Shalmaneser is a supervised learning toolbox for shallow semantic parsing, i.e. the automatic assignment of semantic classes and roles to text. The system was developed for Frame Semantics; thus we use Frame Semantics terminology and call the classes frames and the roles frame elements. However, the architecture is reasonably general, and with a certain amount of adaption, Shalmaneser should be usable for other paradigms (e.g., PropBank roles) as well. Shalmaneser caters both for end users, and for researchers.

For end users, we provide a simple end user mode which can simply apply the pre-trained classifiers for English (FrameNet annotation / Collins parser) and German (SALSA Frame annotation / Sleepy parser). For researchers interested in investigating shallow semanticparsing, our system is extensively configurable and extendable.

Literature

K. Erk and S. Pado: Shalmaneser - a flexible toolbox for semantic role assignment. Proceedings of LREC 2006, Genoa, Italy. Click here for details. Shalmaneser Screenshot