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Computational Semantics Tools for Glue Semantics

Paper · 2025 · Mark-Matthias Zymla, Mary Dalrymple and Agnieszka Patejuk

Summary

The paper describes a suite of programs for Glue Semantics. In this approach to semantic composition, partial meanings are paired with linear logic formulas that refer to parts of the syntactic analysis. The approach originated in Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), but it also works with other formalisms, including Universal Dependencies (UD). The suite has three components. The first is an updated Glue Semantics Workbench (GSWB), which automatically constructs Glue proofs. The second is XLE+Glue, which connects GSWB to the XLE platform. In it, the semantic contribution of words and rules is specified directly in the grammar, as the co-descriptive approach requires. The third is LiGER, a system that rewrites and augments graphs of LFG and UD analyses. It implements the "description-by-analysis" approach. Together, these tools make it possible to vary the fragment of linear logic, the meaning language, and the way semantics is derived. The paper contains no quantitative evaluation. Their usefulness is demonstrated through examples: automatic verification of theoretical analyses, a teaching grammar, and a study of cross-linguistic differences in ambiguity. For NLP, this offers a path to formal semantics on top of UD analyses.

Key points

  • GSWB has three different Glue provers. Its modular design allows new fragments of linear logic and new meaning languages to be added, for example predicate logic with lambdas or DRT. The code of all three tools is open source on GitHub.
  • XLE+Glue makes it possible to add semantics to XLE grammars, which are developed in the ParGram project for many languages, including English, German, French, Norwegian, and Polish.
  • LiGER replaces the XLE transfer component, which is no longer maintained. Its rules match fragments of f-structures and add meaning constructors to them. In the same way, the system can be used to enrich analyses with data from other resources.
  • XLE+Glue was used to verify a theoretical analysis of a complex sentence with several possible readings. All readings that the system derived automatically turned out to be equivalent to the two expected ones.
  • A teaching grammar built on GSWB and LiGER produces Boxer-style DRSs with neo-Davidsonian event semantics. In particular, it models tense and aspect: it interprets the tense of a subordinate clause relative to the tense of the main clause.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Universal Dependencies · 184 works

Cite

Cite as Mark-Matthias Zymla, Mary Dalrymple and Agnieszka Patejuk. 2025. Computational Semantics Tools for Glue Semantics. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{zymla2025computational,
  title = {{Computational Semantics Tools for Glue Semantics}},
  author = {Mark-Matthias Zymla, Mary Dalrymple and Agnieszka Patejuk},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-main.18/}
}

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