A Unified Syntax-aware Framework for Semantic Role Labeling

Zuchao Li, Shexia He, Jiaxun Cai, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Gongshen Liu, Linlin Li, Luo Si


Abstract
Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to recognize the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Syntactic information has been paid a great attention over the role of enhancing SRL. However, the latest advance shows that syntax would not be so important for SRL with the emerging much smaller gap between syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic SRL. To comprehensively explore the role of syntax for SRL task, we extend existing models and propose a unified framework to investigate more effective and more diverse ways of incorporating syntax into sequential neural networks. Exploring the effect of syntactic input quality on SRL performance, we confirm that high-quality syntactic parse could still effectively enhance syntactically-driven SRL. Using empirically optimized integration strategy, we even enlarge the gap between syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic SRL. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on CoNLL-2009 benchmarks both for English and Chinese, substantially outperforming all previous models.
Anthology ID:
D18-1262
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2401–2411
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1262
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1262
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zuchao Li, Shexia He, Jiaxun Cai, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Gongshen Liu, Linlin Li, and Luo Si. 2018. A Unified Syntax-aware Framework for Semantic Role Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2401–2411, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Unified Syntax-aware Framework for Semantic Role Labeling (Li et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1262.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1262.mp4
Code
 bcmi220/unified_syn_srl