---
title: "An Incremental Parser for Abstract Meaning — Damonte 2017"
description: "The paper tackles parsing sentences into Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a graph-based semantic formalism that combines named entities, semantic…"
authors: ["Marco Damonte", "Shay B. Cohen", "Giorgio Satta"]
year: 2017
venue: "Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/E17-1051/"
arxiv: "1608.06111"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/damonte-2017-incremental-parser-abstract-meaning-representation/"
---
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# An Incremental Parser for Abstract Meaning Representation

**Authors:** Marco Damonte, [Shay B. Cohen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/shay-b-cohen/), Giorgio Satta · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/E17-1051/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/E17-1051.pdf) · [arXiv 1608.06111](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06111) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4301221709)

**Citations:** 1 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [116](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper tackles parsing sentences into Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a graph-based semantic formalism that combines named entities, semantic roles, word senses and coreference in one structure. The authors adapt transition-based dependency parsing to this task. Their system, AMR-EAGER, builds on ARC-EAGER (Nivre, 2004) and reads a sentence once, left to right, in worst-case linear time. To make this work for AMR, they map word tokens to graph fragments, allow nodes with several parents (reentrancy), and use a modified Reduce transition that can add edges between sibling nodes. This last change captures control-verb patterns and some non-projective structures. A feed-forward neural network chooses each transition greedily. The authors also argue that a single Smatch score hides important differences between parsers, so they release a suite of metrics for individual subtasks. On LDC2015E86, the parser is competitive but does not lead on overall Smatch. It is strongest on named entities and negation. The work matters because it brings AMR closer to fast, incremental dependency-parsing methods and offers a more detailed way to compare parsers.

## Key points
- In 200 manually aligned AMRs, only 6% of edges are non-projective, yet 51% of graphs contain at least one such edge. Reentrancy appears in 93% of graphs.
- On LDC2015E86, AMR-EAGER reaches a Smatch of 64, compared with 67 for JAMR (2016), 63 for CAMR (2015) and 58 for JAMR (2014).
- The parser is best on Named Ent. (83) and Negations (48). It ties for the top Unlabeled (69) and Concepts (83) scores and comes within one point of the best Reentrancy score (41 vs 42).
- The evaluation suite scores several subtasks separately: unlabeled graphs, no WSD, NP-only, reentrancy, concepts, named entities, wikification, negation, and SRL (Smatch over :ARG edges).
- The code is public: the parser at github.com/mdtux89/amr-eager and the metrics at github.com/mdtux89/amr-evaluation, plus an online demo. By contrast, CAMR is quadratic in the worst case, and parts of JAMR run in more than linear time.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) · [Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/machine-translation/)

Topics: [Named entity recognition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/named-entity-recognition/) · [Dependency parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dependency-parsing/) · [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cited by

Cited by

116 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 12 of them have a page here, 104 not yet.

- [AMR Parsing via Graph-Sequence Iterative Inference](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cai-2020-amr-parsing-graph-sequence-iterative/)
- [ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/huang-2023-paraamr-large-scale-syntactically-diverse/)
- [Neural AMR: Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Parsing and Generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/konstas-2017-neural-amr-sequence-sequence-models/)
- [Abstract Meaning Representation for Multi-Document Summarization](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/liao-2018-abstract-meaning-representation-multi-document/)
- [Survey of Abstract Meaning Representation: Then, Now, Future](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mansouri-2025-survey-abstract-meaning-representation-then/)
- [DocAMR: Multi-Sentence AMR Representation and Evaluation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/naseem-2022-docamr-multi-sentence-amr-representation/)
- [Dealing with Co-reference in Neural Semantic Parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/noord-2017-dealing-co-reference-neural-semantic/)
- [Neural Semantic Parsing by Character-based Translation: Experiments with Abstract Meaning Representations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/noord-2017-neural-semantic-parsing-character-based/)
- [Towards a Decomposable Metric for Explainable Evaluation of Text Generation from AMR](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/opitz-2021-decomposable-metric-explainable-evaluation-text/)
- [Bridging Semantic Frameworks: mapping DRS onto AMR](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/pavlova-2023-bridging-semantic-frameworks-mapping-drs/)
- [A Structured Syntax-Semantics Interface for English-AMR Alignment](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/szubert-2018-structured-syntax-semantics-interface-english/)
- [AMR Parsing with an Incremental Joint Model](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhou-2016-amr-parsing-incremental-joint-model/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{damonte2017incremental,
  title = {{An Incremental Parser for Abstract Meaning Representation}},
  author = {Damonte, Marco and Cohen, Shay B. and Satta, Giorgio},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers},
  year = {2017},
  eprint = {1608.06111},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06111}
}
```

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