Abstract

Like a parse tree, AMR provides a single, traversable structure that takes all words into account. It is not a disconnected set of annotation layers. Unlike a parse tree, the AMR is abstract. It may represent any number of natural language sentences. AMR does not annotate the individual words in a sentence, like a dependency parse does.
AMR implements a simplified, standard neo-Davidsonian semantics [Davidson 1967, Higginbotham 1985], using standard feature structure representation [Shieber 1986, Carpenter 1992]. AMR’s formal origins are in unification systems [Kay 1979, Knight 1989, Moore 1989] and natural language generation [Mann 1982, Elhadad 1988, Knight & Hatzivassiloglou 1995]. Predicates senses and core semantic roles in AMR are drawn from the amazing OntoNotes project.

Date

January 10, 2026

Authors

Laura Banarescu, Claire Bonial, Shu Cai, Madalina Georgescu, Kira Griffitt, Ulf Hermjakob, Kevin Knight, Philipp Koehn, Martha Palmer, Nathan Schneider

Journal

Parsing on Freebase from Question-Answer Pairs. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Seattle: ACL

Pages

1533-1544