Exploring Non-Verbal Predicates in Semantic Role Labeling: Challenges and Opportunities
Riccardo Orlando, Simone Conia, Roberto Navigli
Findings: Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas Findings Paper
Session 1: Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Spotlight Session: Spotlight - Metropolitan West (Spotlight)
Conference Room: Metropolitan West
Conference Time: July 10, 19:00-21:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Spotlight Session (23:00-01:00 UTC)
Keywords:
semantic textual similarity
TLDR:
Although we have witnessed impressive progress in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), most of the research in the area is carried out assuming that the majority of predicates are verbs.
Conversely, predicates can also be expressed using other parts of speech, e.g., nouns and adjectives.
However, non-verba...
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Abstract:
Although we have witnessed impressive progress in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), most of the research in the area is carried out assuming that the majority of predicates are verbs.
Conversely, predicates can also be expressed using other parts of speech, e.g., nouns and adjectives.
However, non-verbal predicates appear in the benchmarks we commonly use to measure progress in SRL less frequently than in some real-world settings -- newspaper headlines, dialogues, and tweets, among others.
In this paper, we put forward a new PropBank dataset which boasts wide coverage of multiple predicate types. Thanks to it, we demonstrate empirically that standard benchmarks do not provide an accurate picture of the current situation in SRL and that state-of-the-art systems are still incapable of transferring knowledge across different predicate types.
Having observed these issues, we also present a novel, manually-annotated challenge set designed to give equal importance to verbal, nominal, and adjectival predicate-argument structures. We use such dataset to investigate whether we can leverage different linguistic resources to promote knowledge transfer.
In conclusion, we claim that SRL is far from "solved", and its integration with other semantic tasks might enable significant improvements in the future, especially for the long tail of non-verbal predicates, thereby facilitating further research on SRL for non-verbal predicates.
We release our software and datasets at https://github.com/sapienzanlp/exploring-srl.