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# Abstract Meaning Representation for Sembanking

**Authors:** Laura Banarescu, [Claire Bonial](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/claire-bonial/), Shu Cai, Madalina Georgescu, Kira Griffitt, [Ulf Hermjakob](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/ulf-hermjakob/), [Kevin Knight](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/kevin-knight/), [Philipp Koehn](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/philipp-koehn/), [Martha Palmer](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/martha-palmer/), [Nathan Schneider](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/nathan-schneider/) · **Year:** 2013 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse (LAW VII) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W13-2322](https://aclanthology.org/W13-2322/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**1117** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2252123671) openalex · 2026-10-19[**853** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/banarescu-2013-abstract-meaning-representation-sembanking/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W13-23/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W13-2322/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W13-2322.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2252123671)

**Authors (10)**

1. [Laura Banarescu](https://openalex.org/A5087575792) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3460261) · h 2 · 1250 citations · 4 works
2. [Claire Bonial](https://openalex.org/A5087092493) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3154-2852) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3202888) · h 17 · 2063 citations · 114 works
3. Shu Cai [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9010-9653) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2112618394)
4. [Madalina Georgescu](https://openalex.org/A5010792631) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2065872210) · h 2 · 1250 citations · 6 works
5. [Kira Griffitt](https://openalex.org/A5037109852) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3168985) · h 8 · 1810 citations · 50 works
6. [Ulf Hermjakob](https://openalex.org/A5044761050) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1791311) · h 23 · 3054 citations · 71 works
7. [Kevin Knight](https://openalex.org/A5106821597) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9117-1718) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/152971314) · h 83 · 24348 citations · 407 works
8. [Philipp Koehn](https://openalex.org/A5112315093) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1755162) · h 67 · 33036 citations · 401 works
9. [Martha Palmer](https://openalex.org/A5017464054) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9864-6974) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145755155) · h 57 · 21263 citations · 417 works
10. [Nathan Schneider](https://openalex.org/A5014008069) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2745-0533) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145254207) · h 28 · 6684 citations · 159 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper presents Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a rooted, labelled graph for the meaning of whole sentences, meant to be easy for people to read and for programs to traverse. Concepts are English words, PropBank frames such as describe-01, or keywords for entities, dates and quantities. Edges are about a hundred relations, mostly PropBank arguments. The design aims at one graph per meaning, so that a passive, a nominal and a verbal form of the same sentence receive the same graph. Articles and tense are left out, and the authors state that AMR is English-biased and is not an interlingua. The paper describes a bank of several thousand sentences, annotated by trained annotators at about 7 to 10 minutes per sentence from scratch and 1 to 3 minutes for post-editing. It reports no parsing experiment.

## Ideas

- I1. Function words are not concepts. AMR drops articles and tense from the graph and keeps only their semantic role. Keep determiners, tense and articles as features of the meta token (open problem 4), and not as tokens of their own.
- I2. Role-keyed merges: a concept merge must keep the argument roles of its members (arg0, arg1). A be/have merge fails this check, so a role test can block it without a list of banned pairs.
- I3. Score meta-worlds as sets of triples (concept, role, concept) with a Smatch-style F-score, reported beside exact match, so that a reading with one wrong relation is not scored as zero.

## For Mova

The code is `tools/translate/meta.rs` and `hebrew.rs`. I1 and I2 address open problems 2 and 4. The graph format itself is not for Mova, but PropBank-keyed frames fit the frames that `prag` already builds, which makes the role check in I2 easy to write.

Topics: [Semantic role labeling](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/semantic-role-labeling/) · [Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/machine-translation/)

## Cite

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

```
@inproceedings{banarescu2013abstract,
  title = {{Abstract Meaning Representation for Sembanking}},
  author = {Banarescu, Laura and Bonial, Claire and Cai, Shu and Georgescu, Madalina and Griffitt, Kira and Hermjakob, Ulf and Knight, Kevin and Koehn, Philipp and Palmer, Martha and Schneider, Nathan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse},
  year = {2013},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W13-2322/}
}
```

- [← previous EUROTRA: an assessment of the current state of the EC's MT programme](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/arnold-1991-eurotra-assessment-current-state-ec/)
- [next → METEOR: An Automatic Metric for MT Evaluation with Improved Correlation with Human Judgments](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/banerjee-2005-meteor-automatic-metric-mt-evaluation/)
- [↑ back to Machine translation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/mtrans/)

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