  The paper proposes the task of universal semantic tagging---tagging word
tokens with language-neutral, semantically informative tags. We argue that the
task, with its independent nature, contributes to better semantic analysis for
wide-coverage multilingual text. We present the initial version of the semantic
tagset and show that (a) the tags provide semantically fine-grained
information, and (b) they are suitable for cross-lingual semantic parsing. An
application of the semantic tagging in the Parallel Meaning Bank supports both
of these points as the tags contribute to formal lexical semantics and their
cross-lingual projection. As a part of the application, we annotate a small
corpus with the semantic tags and present new baseline result for universal
semantic tagging.
