  Universal Dependencies (UD) offer a uniform cross-lingual syntactic
representation, with the aim of advancing multilingual applications. Recent
work shows that semantic parsing can be accomplished by transforming syntactic
dependencies to logical forms. However, this work is limited to English, and
cannot process dependency graphs, which allow handling complex phenomena such
as control. In this work, we introduce UDepLambda, a semantic interface for UD,
which maps natural language to logical forms in an almost language-independent
fashion and can process dependency graphs. We perform experiments on question
answering against Freebase and provide German and Spanish translations of the
WebQuestions and GraphQuestions datasets to facilitate multilingual evaluation.
Results show that UDepLambda outperforms strong baselines across languages and
datasets. For English, it achieves a 4.9 F1 point improvement over the
state-of-the-art on GraphQuestions. Our code and data can be downloaded at
https://github.com/sivareddyg/udeplambda.

Computation and Language