A Tour of Explicit Multilingual Semantics: Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling and Semantic Parsing (2022)

Abstract: The recent advent of modern pretrained language models has sparked a revolution in Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially in multilingual and cross-lingual applications. Today, such language models have become the de facto standard for providing rich input representations to neural systems, achieving unprecedented results in an increasing range of benchmarks. However, questions that often arise are: firstly, whether current language models are, indeed, able to capture explicit, symbolic meaning; secondly, if they are, to what extent; thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, whether current approaches are capable of scaling across languages. In this cutting-edge tutorial, we will review recent efforts that have aimed at shedding light on meaning in NLP, with a focus on three key open problems in lexical and sentence-level semantics: Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling, and Semantic Parsing. After a brief introduction, we will spotlight how state-of-the-art models tackle these tasks in multiple languages, showing where they excel and where they fail. We hope that this tutorial will broaden the audience interested in multilingual semantics and inspire researchers to further advance the field.

## tutorial description and relevance over the past few years, the field of natural language processing (nlp) has witnessed tremendous growth, mainly thanks to the increasingly wide availability of modern pretrained language models, such as elmo @xcite , bert @xcite , and bart @xcite , which have enabled unprecedented results in a broad range of tasks, from neural machine translation to question answering, information retrieval and text summarization, inter alia. however, important questions that naturally arise when * proposal written while at sapienza university of rome. ## tutorial structure and contents the tutorial will be structured in a bottom-up fashion: participants will be introduced to multilingual semantics, first at the lexical level with wsd, and then at the sentence level with srl and sp, highlighting the most effective approaches to date, but also their weaknesses and future directions to address these. ## type, prerequisites and audience this is a cutting-edge tutorial. state-of-the-art approaches for three key areas of multilingual lexi-cal and sentence semantics will be presented, and some of them will be discussed in detail. we expect 80-120 attendees from different fields as the barriers to entry will be low: ## reading list recommended work to read before the tutorial: @xcite : a survey on recent trends in wsd; ## pedagogical material part 1 (wsd), part 2 (srl) and part 3 (sp) will include brief hands-on sessions. these will be supported by interactive demos and jupyter/ipython/colab notebooks to invite participants to play with high-performance pretrained systems for wsd, srl and sp. all material (slides, notebooks, pretrained models) will be freely available online to let discussions continue beyond the tutorial and for teaching purposes. ## ethics & diversity statement we do not foresee any major ethical issue for the topics covered in this tutorial. we acknowledge that pretrained language models may show biases towards some stereotypes, cultures, ethnic and/or social groups: perpetrating such biases is not in our intentions. we will cover a variety of languages, including arabic, chinese, english, french, german, italian, spanish: we hope that our effort can promote new studies aimed at making lexical and sentence semantics increasingly more inclusive of lower-resource languages.