  To understand a sentence like "whereas only 10% of White Americans live at or
below the poverty line, 28% of African Americans do" it is important not only
to identify individual facts, e.g., poverty rates of distinct demographic
groups, but also the higher-order relations between them, e.g., the disparity
between them. In this paper, we propose the task of Textual Analogy Parsing
(TAP) to model this higher-order meaning. The output of TAP is a frame-style
meaning representation which explicitly specifies what is shared (e.g., poverty
rates) and what is compared (e.g., White Americans vs. African Americans, 10%
vs. 28%) between its component facts. Such a meaning representation can enable
new applications that rely on discourse understanding such as automated chart
generation from quantitative text. We present a new dataset for TAP, baselines,
and a model that successfully uses an ILP to enforce the structural constraints
of the problem.
