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Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a semantic labeling system in the AMR family designed to be uniformly applicable to typologically diverse languages. The UMR labeling system is quite thorough and can be time-consuming to execute, especially if annotators are starting from scratch. In this paper, we focus on methods for bootstrapping UMR annotations for a given language from existing resources, and specifically from typical products of language documentation work, such as lexical databases and interlinear glossed text (IGT). Using Arapaho as our test case, we present and evaluate a bootstrapping process that automatically generates UMR subgraphs from IGT. Additionally, we describe and evaluate a method for bootstrapping valency lexicon entries from lexical databases for both the target language and English. We are able to generate enough basic structure in UMR graphs from the existing Arapaho interlinearized texts to automate UMR labeling to a significant extent. Our method thus has the potential to streamline the process of building meaning representations for new languages without existing large-scale computational resources. 

Arapaho is an endangered Native American language with fewer than 100 fluent speakers, all elderly. The age and health of the speakers limit our ability to do traditional on-the-ground documentation of language in relation to geography and space. In this project, a virtual reality (VR) elicitation process was developed in collaboration with elders of the Northern Arapaho Language and Culture Commission. This new place-sensitive method of linguistic documentation uses aerial drone video and 8K resolution, three-dimensional (3D), 360-degree panoramas to visually and auditorily immerse elder consultants in physical locations oriented around the traditional Arapaho worldview. This method virtually transports elder speakers of Indigenous languages into places and contexts that may be physically impossible for them to visit in person, allowing them to recall place-based cultural and ecological knowledge. Analysis of interview data resulting from VR elicitation shows it to be comparable to other language documentation techniques in terms of the quality of the data while also possessing unique attributes and utility. 

This paper reports the first release of the UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) data set. UMR is a graph-based meaning representation formalism consisting of a sentence-level graph and a document-level graph. The sentence-level graph represents predicate-argument structures, named entities, word senses, aspectuality of events, as well as person and number information for entities. The document-level graph represents coreferential, temporal, and modal relations that go beyond sentence boundaries. UMR is designed to capture the commonalities and variations across languages and this is done through the use of a common set of abstract concepts, relations, and attributes as well as concrete concepts derived from words from invidual languages. This UMR release includes annotations for six languages (Arapaho, Chinese, English, Kukama, Navajo, Sanapana) that vary greatly in terms of their linguistic properties and resource availability. We also describe on-going efforts to enlarge this data set and extend it to other genres and modalities. We also briefly describe the available infrastructure (UMR annotation guidelines and tools) that others can use to create similar data sets. 

This paper reports the first release of the UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) data set. UMR is a graph-based meaning representation formalism consisting of a sentence-level graph and a document-level graph. The sentence-level graph represents predicate-argument structures, named entities, word senses, aspectuality of events, as well as person and number information for entities. The document-level graph represents coreferential, temporal, and modal relations that go beyond sentence boundaries. UMR is designed to capture the commonalities and variations across languages and this is done through the use of a common set of abstract concepts, relations, and attributes as well as concrete concepts derived from words from invidual languages. This UMR release includes annotations for six languages (Arapaho, Chinese, English, Kukama, Navajo, Sanapana) that vary greatly in terms of their linguistic properties and resource availability. We also describe on-going efforts to enlarge this data set and extend it to other genres and modalities. We also briefly describe the available infrastructure (UMR annotation guidelines and tools) that others can use to create similar data sets. 

Rooted in AMR, Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a graph-based formalism with nodes as concepts and edges as relations between them. When used to represent natural language semantics, UMR maps words in a sentence to concepts in the UMR graph. Multiword expressions (MWEs) pose a particular challenge to UMR annotation because they deviate from the default one-to-one mapping between words and concepts. There are different types of MWEs which require different kinds of annotation that must be specified in guidelines. This paper discusses the specific treatment for each type of MWE in UMR. 

This paper presents detailed mappings between the structures used in Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and those used in Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR). These structures include general semantic roles, rolesets, and concepts that are largely shared between AMR and UMR, but with crucial differences. While UMR annotation of new low-resource languages is ongoing, AMR-annotated corpora already exist for many languages, and these AMR corpora are ripe for conversion to UMR format. Rather than focusing on semantic coverage that is new to UMR (which will likely need to be dealt with manually), this paper serves as a resource (with illustrated mappings) for users looking to understand the fine-grained adjustments that have been made to the representation techniques for semantic categories present in both AMR and UMR. 

In this paper we present Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a meaning representation designed to annotate the semantic content of a text. UMR is primarily based on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), an annotation framework initially designed for English, but also draws from other meaning representations. UMR extends AMR to other languages, particularly morphologically complex, low-resource languages. UMR also adds features to AMR that are critical to semantic interpretation and enhances AMR by proposing a companion document-level representation that captures linguistic phenomena such as coreference as well as temporal and modal dependencies that potentially go beyond sentence boundaries.