Syntax for Semantic Role Labeling, To Be, Or Not To Be

Shexia He, Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao, Hongxiao Bai


Abstract
Semantic role labeling (SRL) is dedicated to recognizing the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Previous studies have shown syntactic information has a remarkable contribution to SRL performance. However, such perception was challenged by a few recent neural SRL models which give impressive performance without a syntactic backbone. This paper intends to quantify the importance of syntactic information to dependency SRL in deep learning framework. We propose an enhanced argument labeling model companying with an extended korder argument pruning algorithm for effectively exploiting syntactic information. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the CoNLL-2008, 2009 benchmarks for both English and Chinese, showing the quantitative significance of syntax to neural SRL together with a thorough empirical survey over existing models.
Anthology ID:
P18-1192
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2061–2071
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1192
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1192
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shexia He, Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao, and Hongxiao Bai. 2018. Syntax for Semantic Role Labeling, To Be, Or Not To Be. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2061–2071, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Syntax for Semantic Role Labeling, To Be, Or Not To Be (He et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1192.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1192.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-1192.mp4
Code
 bcmi220/srl_syn_pruning