Compositional Syntactico-SemBanking for English as a Second or Foreign Language
Wenxi Li, Xihao Wang, Weiwei Sun
Abstract
Despite the widespread use of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESFL), developing syntactico-semantic representations for it is limited — the irregularities in ESFL complicate systematic composition and subsequently the derivation of its semantics.This paper draws on constructivism and proposes a novel Synchronous Hyperedge Replacement Grammar (SHRG)-based constructivist approach to address the challenges. By using constructions as fundamental units, this approach not only accommodates both the idiosyncrasies and the compositional nature of ESFL, but also bridges the gap between literal cues and intended meaning.The feasibility of this constructivist approach is demonstrated using real ESFL data, resulting in a gold-standard, medium-sized syntactico-semantic bank that covers a wide range of ESFL phenomena.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-compositional,
title = "Compositional Syntactico-{S}em{B}anking for {E}nglish as a Second or Foreign Language",
author = "Li, Wenxi and
Wang, Xihao and
Sun, Weiwei",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.1252/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1252",
pages = "24395--24406",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}