A Syntax-aware Multi-task Learning Framework for Chinese Semantic Role Labeling

Qingrong Xia, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang


Abstract
Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to identify the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Inspired by the strong correlation between syntax and semantics, previous works pay much attention to improve SRL performance on exploiting syntactic knowledge, achieving significant results. Pipeline methods based on automatic syntactic trees and multi-task learning (MTL) approaches using standard syntactic trees are two common research orientations. In this paper, we adopt a simple unified span-based model for both span-based and word-based Chinese SRL as a strong baseline. Besides, we present a MTL framework that includes the basic SRL module and a dependency parser module. Different from the commonly used hard parameter sharing strategy in MTL, the main idea is to extract implicit syntactic representations from the dependency parser as external inputs for the basic SRL model. Experiments on the benchmarks of Chinese Proposition Bank 1.0 and CoNLL-2009 Chinese datasets show that our proposed framework can effectively improve the performance over the strong baselines. With the external BERT representations, our framework achieves new state-of-the-art 87.54 and 88.5 F1 scores on the two test data of the two benchmarks, respectively. In-depth analysis are conducted to gain more insights on the proposed framework and the effectiveness of syntax.
Anthology ID:
D19-1541
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5382–5392
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1541
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1541
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qingrong Xia, Zhenghua Li, and Min Zhang. 2019. A Syntax-aware Multi-task Learning Framework for Chinese Semantic Role Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5382–5392, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Syntax-aware Multi-task Learning Framework for Chinese Semantic Role Labeling (Xia et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1541.pdf
Code
 KiroSummer/A_Syntax-aware_MTL_Framework_for_Chinese_SRL