Universal conceptual cognitive annotation (UCCA)

Syntactic structures, by their nature, reflect first and foremost the formal constructions used for expressing meanings. This renders them sensitive to formal variation both within and across languages, and limits their value to semantic applications. We present UCCA, a novel multi-layered framework for semantic representation that aims to accommodate the semantic distinctions expressed through linguistic utterances. We demonstrate UCCA's portability across domains and languages, and its relative insensitivity to meaning-preserving syntactic variation. We also show that UCCA can be effectively and quickly learned by annotators with no linguistic background, and describe the compilation of a UCCA-annotated corpus.