VerbAtlas: a novel large-scale verbal semantic resource and its application to semantic role labeling

We present VerbAtlas, a new, hand-crafted lexical-semantic resource whose goal is to bring together all verbal synsets from WordNet into semantically-coherent frames. The frames define a common, prototypical argument structure while at the same time providing new concept-specific information. In contrast to PropBank, which defines enumerative semantic roles, VerbAtlas comes with an explicit, cross-frame set of semantic roles linked to selectional preferences expressed in terms of WordNet synsets, and is the first resource enriched with semantic information about implicit, shadow, and default arguments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VerbAtlas in the task of dependency-based Semantic Role Labeling and show how its integration into a high-performance system leads to improvements on both the in-domain and out-of-domain test sets of CoNLL-2009. VerbAtlas is available at http://verbatlas.org

Predicate Matrix: an interoperable lexical knowledge base for predicates

183 p.La Matriz de Predicados (Predicate Matrix en inglés) es un nuevo recurso léxico-semántico resultado de la integración de múltiples fuentes de conocimiento, entre las cuales se encuentran FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank y WordNet. La Matriz de Predicados proporciona un léxico extenso y robusto que permite mejorar la interoperabilidad entre los recursos semánticos mencionados anteriormente. La creación de la Matriz de Predicados se basa en la integración de Semlink y nuevos mappings obtenidos utilizando métodos automáticos que enlazan el conocimiento semántico a nivel léxico y de roles. Asimismo, hemos ampliado la Predicate Matrix para cubrir los predicados nominales (inglés, español) y predicados en otros idiomas (castellano, catalán y vasco). Como resultado, la Matriz de predicados proporciona un léxico multilingüe que permite el análisis semántico interoperable en múltiples idiomas

Bridging the Gap in Multilingual Semantic Role Labeling: A Language-Agnostic Approach

Recent research indicates that taking advantage of complex syntactic features leads to favorable results in Semantic Role Labeling. Nonetheless, an analysis of the latest state-of-the-art multilingual systems reveals the difficulty of bridging the wide gap in performance between high-resource (e.g., English) and low-resource (e.g., German) settings. To overcome this issue, we propose a fully language-agnostic model that does away with morphological and syntactic features to achieve robustness across languages. Our approach outperforms the state of the art in all the languages of the CoNLL-2009 benchmark dataset, especially whenever a scarce amount of training data is available. Our objective is not to reject approaches that rely on syntax, rather to set a strong and consistent language-independent baseline for future innovations in Semantic Role Labeling. We release our model code and checkpoints at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/multi-srl

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 98 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

Splitting light verbs in the resultative construction

This thesis examines the resultative construction in Mandarin Chinese, and extends to different resultative patterns in Shanghai dialect and Innu-aimûn. The objective of the study is to investigate the derivational process of various resultative patterns with the labeling theory. I will attempt to provide a symmetric analysis of the resultative construction in general. Hopefully, this study will shed some light on the interface study between the syntactic derivation and the event semantic analysis in the resultative construction. In Mandarin Chinese, a v-splitting structure is proposed in compounding resultatives and DE-resultatives, in which multiple adjacent light verbs are hypothesized along with feature inheritance. The v-splitting structure is also applied to a pattern containing a preverbal resultative adverb in Mandarin Chinese, which is termed as adverb-resultatives. I propose that these patterns fall into the resultative construction in a broad sense. The splitting approach is better than a base-generated structure with two v heads. One advantage is that it allows us to formulate the analysis in which the root raises to v* without violating the head movement constraint. It also works better to explain the specificity effect, when it is based on a splitting structure and labeling requirement. Extending the study to the cross-linguistic scope, resultatives in Shanghai dialect and Innuaimûn are briefly explored. On the one hand, a mono-layer light verb is proposed in Shanghai dialect, in which the resultative predicate does not undergo head movement to the light verb, ending up with the serial verb pattern. The contrast between Shanghai and Mandarin resultatives indicates the diachronical development of light verbs in Chinese: from a unified mono-layer to a v-splitting structure. On the other hand, in Innu-aimûn, the resultative predicate is realized in the preverbal position within the complex verb structure. Multiple head movement is analogically explored in Innu-aimûn. Through the comparative study, the parameter of head movement is emphasized in various resultative patterns. Different strategies to the symmetry-breaking are proposed across languages. In English, the label matching is used in the VP agreement system. However, this is not unanimously applied to other languages. In Innu-aimûn, result-raising in the resultative construction is the only possibility to break the symmetry of an uninterpretable configuration. In Chinese, two ways are proposed on the symmetrybreaking: the feature-matching as the core mechanism in the VP agreement system, and result-raising as a supplementary operation