Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 22 October, 15:15
Conference Room, Building C7 4
Please note the unusual time!

Dependency-based semantic role labeling

When extracting information from natural-language text, we need to automatically determine the logical relations between events and their participants and circumstances. We refer to this process as semantic role labeling.
Syntactic structures are generally agreed to be necessary for semantic role labeling, and most previous implementations of semantic role labelers have used constituents (phrase structure) as the syntactic input. Dependency syntax, on the other hand, has not received much attention for this task despite its conceptual simplicity, intuitive affinity to semantics, and cross-linguistic applicability.

Our work shows that contrary to previous claims, dependency syntax is viable as the syntactic input for semantic role labeling systems. This is not only theoretically important since it makes the syntactic-semantic interface conceptually simpler and more intuitive, but also paves the way for the application of semantic role labeling techniques to languages where dependency is the only viable syntactic representation.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Hagen Fürstenau.