Capturing Argument Interaction in Semantic Role Labeling with Capsule Networks

Xinchi Chen, Chunchuan Lyu, Ivan Titov


Abstract
Semantic role labeling (SRL) involves extracting propositions (i.e. predicates and their typed arguments) from natural language sentences. State-of-the-art SRL models rely on powerful encoders (e.g., LSTMs) and do not model non-local interaction between arguments. We propose a new approach to modeling these interactions while maintaining efficient inference. Specifically, we use Capsule Networks (Sabour et al., 2017): each proposition is encoded as a tuple of capsules, one capsule per argument type (i.e. role). These tuples serve as embeddings of entire propositions. In every network layer, the capsules interact with each other and with representations of words in the sentence. Each iteration results in updated proposition embeddings and updated predictions about the SRL structure. Our model substantially outperforms the non-refinement baseline model on all 7 CoNLL-2019 languages and achieves state-of-the-art results on 5 languages (including English) for dependency SRL. We analyze the types of mistakes corrected by the refinement procedure. For example, each role is typically (but not always) filled with at most one argument. Whereas enforcing this approximate constraint is not useful with the modern SRL system, iterative procedure corrects the mistakes by capturing this intuition in a flexible and context-sensitive way.
Anthology ID:
D19-1544
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:
5415–5425
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1544
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1544
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinchi Chen, Chunchuan Lyu, and Ivan Titov. 2019. Capturing Argument Interaction in Semantic Role Labeling with Capsule Networks. 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 5415–5425, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Capturing Argument Interaction in Semantic Role Labeling with Capsule Networks (Chen et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1544.pdf
Code
 DalstonChen/CapNetSRL