---
title: "AMR Parsing with an Incremental Joint Model — Zhou 2016"
description: "The paper addresses a weakness of pipelined Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsers such as JAMR."
authors: ["Junsheng Zhou", "Feiyu Xu", "Hans Uszkoreit", "Weiguang Qu", "Ran Li", "Yanhui Gu"]
year: 2016
venue: "Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/D16-1065/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/d16-1065"
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/zhou-2016-amr-parsing-incremental-joint-model/"
---
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# AMR Parsing with an Incremental Joint Model

**Authors:** Junsheng Zhou, Feiyu Xu, [Hans Uszkoreit](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/hans-uszkoreit/), Weiguang Qu, Ran Li, Yanhui Gu · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/D16-1065/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/D16-1065.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/d16-1065](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d16-1065) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2563029252)

**Citations:** 49 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [30](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper addresses a weakness of pipelined Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsers such as JAMR. These parsers first pick concepts and then link them with relations, so mistakes made in the first stage cannot be corrected later. The authors instead treat concept identification and relation identification as one joint, incremental problem.

They first design Component-Wise Beam Search (CWBS), a left-to-right decoder for relations. It grows a partial graph by connecting each new concept fragment to the preceding connected components through SHIFT and arc actions, and the final graph is guaranteed to be connected. CWBS is then embedded in a segment-based multiple-beam decoder, so that concept choices and relation choices can inform each other. Training uses a violation-fixing (max-violation) perceptron.

On LDC2013E117 and LDC2014T12, the joint model clearly beats pipelined baselines. It also matches or exceeds CAMR and a CCG-based parser without drawing on external semantic resources. This shows that joint incremental decoding is a practical route to better AMR parsing.

## Key points
- With gold concepts, an oracle CWBS search recovers the gold graphs with 99.6% F-score on LDC2013E117 training data and 99.7% on LDC2014T12. With learned weights, CWBS performs about as well as JAMR's non-incremental MSCG algorithm.
- The joint model reaches F1 0.71 on both datasets, compared with 0.62 and 0.63 for the fixed version of JAMR.
- In the Table 4 comparison, the model scores 0.71 F1. Competing systems score 0.70 (CAMR), 0.68 (CAMR* without extra features) and 0.66 (CCG-based parser on LDC2014T12).
- On the full LDC2014T12 release, the model gets 0.66 F1. This equals CAMR, beats CAMR* (0.64) and JAMR (0.58), and falls just below the SMBT-based parser (0.67), which relies on external resources. The split is 10,312 training, 1,368 development and 1,371 test sentences.
- Unlike the incremental parser of Damonte et al. (2016), this approach can handle non-projective graphs.

*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: [Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/machine-translation/)

## Cited by

Cited by

30 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 27 not yet.

- [An Incremental Parser for Abstract Meaning Representation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/damonte-2017-incremental-parser-abstract-meaning-representation/)
- [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/)
- [AMR-to-text Generation with Synchronous Node Replacement Grammar](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/song-2017-amr-text-generation-synchronous-node/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{zhou2016amr,
  title = {{AMR Parsing with an Incremental Joint Model}},
  author = {Zhou, Junsheng and Xu, Feiyu and Uszkoreit, Hans and Qu, Weiguang and Li, Ran and Gu, Yanhui},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/d16-1065},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d16-1065}
}
```

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