Semantic Role Labeling for Learner Chinese: the Importance of Syntactic Parsing and L2-L1 Parallel Data

Zi Lin, Yuguang Duan, Yuanyuan Zhao, Weiwei Sun, Xiaojun Wan


Abstract
This paper studies semantic parsing for interlanguage (L2), taking semantic role labeling (SRL) as a case task and learner Chinese as a case language. We first manually annotate the semantic roles for a set of learner texts to derive a gold standard for automatic SRL. Based on the new data, we then evaluate three off-the-shelf SRL systems, i.e., the PCFGLA-parser-based, neural-parser-based and neural-syntax-agnostic systems, to gauge how successful SRL for learner Chinese can be. We find two non-obvious facts: 1) the L1-sentence-trained systems performs rather badly on the L2 data; 2) the performance drop from the L1 data to the L2 data of the two parser-based systems is much smaller, indicating the importance of syntactic parsing in SRL for interlanguages. Finally, the paper introduces a new agreement-based model to explore the semantic coherency information in the large-scale L2-L1 parallel data. We then show such information is very effective to enhance SRL for learner texts. Our model achieves an F-score of 72.06, which is a 2.02 point improvement over the best baseline.
Anthology ID:
D18-1414
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:
3793–3802
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1414
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1414
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zi Lin, Yuguang Duan, Yuanyuan Zhao, Weiwei Sun, and Xiaojun Wan. 2018. Semantic Role Labeling for Learner Chinese: the Importance of Syntactic Parsing and L2-L1 Parallel Data. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3793–3802, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Role Labeling for Learner Chinese: the Importance of Syntactic Parsing and L2-L1 Parallel Data (Lin et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1414.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/D18-1414.mp4
Code
 pkucoli/srl4il