Cross-lingual Transfer of Semantic Role Labeling Models

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) has become one of the standard tasks of natural language processing and proven useful as a source of information for a number of other applications. We address the problem of transferring an SRL model from one language to another using a shared feature representation. This approach is then evaluated on three language pairs, demonstrating competitive performance as compared to a state-of-the-art unsupervised SRL system and a cross-lingual annotation projection baseline. We also consider the contribution of different aspects of the feature representation to the performance of the model and discuss practical applicability of this method. 1 Background and Motivation Semantic role labeling has proven useful in many natural language processing tasks, such as question answering (Shen and Lapata, 2007; Kaisser and Webber, 2007), textual entailment (Sammons et al., 2009), machine translation (Wu and Fung, 2009; Liu and Gildea, 2010; Gao and Vogel, 2011) and dialogue systems (Basili et al., 2009; van der Plas et al., 2009). Multiple models have been designed to automatically predict semantic roles, and a considerable amount of data has been annotated to train these models, if only for a few more popular languages. As the annotation is costly, one would like to leverage existing resources to minimize the human effort required to construct a model for a new language. A number of approaches to the construction of semantic role labeling models for new languages have been proposed. On one end of the scale is unsupervised SRL, such as Grenager and Manning (2006), which requires some expert knowledge, but no labeled data. It clusters together arguments that should bear the same semantic role, but does not assign a particular role to each cluster. On the other end is annotating a new dataset from scratch. There are also intermediate options, which often make use of similarities between languages. This way, if an accurate model exists for one language, it should help simplify the construction of a model for another, related language. The approaches in this third group often use parallel data to bridge the gap between languages. Cross-lingual annotation projection systems (Padó and Lapata, 2009), for example, propagate information directly via word alignment links. However, they are very sensitive to the quality of parallel data, as well as the accuracy of a sourcelanguage model on it. An alternative approach, known as cross-lingual model transfer, or cross-lingual model adaptation, consists of modifying a source-language model to make it directly applicable to a new language. This usually involves constructing a shared feature representation across the two languages. McDonald et al. (2011) successfully apply this idea to the transfer of dependency parsers, using part-ofspeech tags as the shared representation of words. A later extension of Täckström et al. (2012) enriches this representation with cross-lingual word clusters, considerably improving the performance. In the case of SRL, a shared representation that is purely syntactic is likely to be insufficient, since structures with different semantics may be realized by the same syntactic construct, for example “in August” vs “in Britain”. However with the help of recently introduced cross-lingual word represen-