Unsupervised argument identification for Semantic Role Labeling

Omri Abend*, Roi Reichart, Ari Rappoport

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

The task of Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is often divided into two sub-tasks: verb argument identification, and argument classification. Current SRL algorithms show lower results on the identification sub-task. Moreover, most SRL algorithms are supervised, relying on large amounts of manually created data. In this paper we present an unsupervised algorithm for identifying verb arguments, where the only type of annotation required is POS tagging. The algorithm makes use of a fully unsupervised syntactic parser, using its output in order to detect clauses and gather candidate argument collocation statistics. We evaluate our algorithm on PropBank10, achieving a precision of 56%, as opposed to 47% of a strong baseline. We also obtain an 8% increase in precision for a Spanish corpus. This is the first paper that tackles unsupervised verb argument identification without using manually encoded rules or extensive lexical or syntactic resources.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2009 - Joint Conf. of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 4th Int. Joint Conf. on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP, Proceedings of the Conf.
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages28-36
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9781617382581
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
EventJoint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP, ACL-IJCNLP 2009 - Suntec, Singapore
Duration: 2 Aug 20097 Aug 2009

Publication series

NameACL-IJCNLP 2009 - Joint Conf. of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 4th Int. Joint Conf. on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP, Proceedings of the Conf.

Conference

ConferenceJoint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP, ACL-IJCNLP 2009
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySuntec
Period2/08/097/08/09

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