Universal Semantic Annotator (USeA)

This is the official repository for the paper Universal Semantic Annotator: the First Unified API for WSD, SRL and Semantic Parsing, which will be presented at LREC 2022 by Riccardo Orlando, Simone Conia, Stefano Faralli, and Roberto Navigli.

Cite this work

If you use USeA or any part of this work, please consider citing the paper as follows:

@inproceedings{orlando-etal-2022-usea,
    title      = "{U}niversal {S}emantic {A}nnotator: the First Unified {API} for {WSD}, {SRL} and {S}emantic {P}arsing",
    author     = "Orlando, Riccardo and Conia, Simone and Faralli, Stefano and Navigli, Roberto",
    booktitle  = "Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022)",
    month      = june,
    year       = "2022",
    address    = "Marseille, France",
    publisher  = "European Language Resources Association"
}

Abstract

In this paper, we present the Universal Semantic Annotator (USeA), which offers the first unified API for high-quality automatic annotations of texts in 100 languages through state-of-the-art systems for Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling and Semantic Parsing. Together, such annotations can be used to provide users with rich and diverse semantic information, help second-language learners, and allow researchers to integrate explicit semantic knowledge into downstream tasks and real-world applications.

Description

Universal Semantic Annotator (USeA) is the first unified API for three primary tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU):

• Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD): the task of assigning the most appropriate sense to a word in context;
• Semantic Role Labeling (SRL): the task of extracting the predicate-argument structures within a sentence;
• Semantic Parsing (Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR): the task of representing a text in a structured semantic graph.

The main motivations behind USeA are manifold: i) the creation of an easy-to-use tool and service for the automatic annotation of explicit semantic knowledge in 100 languages, ii) enabling the use of explicit semantics in multilingual and cross-lingual real-world applications, iii) the democratization of state-of-the-art systems that would otherwise require expert knowledge of the field for their development and implementation, and last but not least iv) fostering further research in NLU and other fields on the interplay between semantics and other modalities, e.g., computer vision, speech recognition, video understanding.

Image Description

This repo is for the Docker image of the USeA service proxy. This image takes care of:

1. Receiving an HTTP/S request to process an input text;
2. Sending task-specific requests to task-specific endpoints (preprocessing, WSD, SRL, AMR parsing);
3. Processing and merging the results from the task-specific endpoints;
4. Returning all the annotations. NOTE: This image does not perform any preprocessing or annotation. For these tasks, please refer to usea-preprocessing, usea-wsd, usea-srl, and usea-amr (soon to be released).

How to use

How to start a usea-service container

Make sure you have installed docker before proceeding, then run the following command:

docker run --name usea-service -p 22000:8000 sapienzanlp/usea-service

If you want to run the container in the background, simply use the flag -d as follows:

docker run -d --name usea-service -p 22000:8000 sapienzanlp/usea-service

If everything went well, the service will become available at localhost:22000/process. You can check that everything is fine with the following Python script:

import requests
import json

text = "La volpe veloce salta sopra il cane pigro."
response = requests.post(
    "http://localhost:22000/process", json={"type": "text", "content": text}
)
print(json.dumps(response.json(), indent=2))

Specifying your own endpoints

By default, the proxy image sends the requests to our online servers. You can specify the URL of the preprocessing, WSD, SRL and AMR parsing enpoints to point to your own (local) instances, as follows:

BASE_HOST=https://nlp.uniroma1.it/usea
PREPROCESSING_ENDPOINT="$BASE_HOST"/preprocessing
WSD_ENDPOINT="$BASE_HOST"/wsd
SRL_ENDPOINT="$BASE_HOST"/srl
AMR_ENDPOINT="$BASE_HOST"/amr

docker run --name usea-service -p 22000:8000 sapienzanlp/usea-service \
    -e PREPROCESSING_ENDPOINT=$PREPROCESSING_ENDPOINT \
    -e WSD_ENDPOINT=$WSD_ENDPOINT \
    -e SRL_ENDPOINT=$SRL_ENDPOINT \
    -e AMR_ENDPOINT=$AMR_ENDPOINT 

Stopping the container

Simply run:

docker stop usea-service

If you also want to remove the container:

docker stop usea-service
docker rm usea-service

Deploy USeA locally

Using Docker Compose

USeA can be started using Docker Compose by simply running the following command:

docker-compose up -d

It will be available at localhost:22000/process. By default, it will run the CPU version of the images. Ports and individual module endpoints can be changed using the .env file.

GPU Support

If you want to use the GPU, you can use one (or more) configuration files inside docker-compose-files folder. Let's say, for example, we want to deploy USeA with GPU support for usea-amr. What you have to do is running the following command:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yaml -f docker-compose-files/docker-compose.amr.cuda.yaml up -d

You can read here for more information about using multiple configuration files.

Without Docker Compose

If you don't want to use Docker Compose, you can manually pull the images from our Docker Hub, and run them as usual.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Language Grid project No. 825627 (Universal Semantic Annotator, USeA) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

License

This work is under the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.