Encoding Sentences with Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Role Labeling

Diego Marcheggiani, Ivan Titov


Abstract
Semantic role labeling (SRL) is the task of identifying the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. It is typically regarded as an important step in the standard NLP pipeline. As the semantic representations are closely related to syntactic ones, we exploit syntactic information in our model. We propose a version of graph convolutional networks (GCNs), a recent class of neural networks operating on graphs, suited to model syntactic dependency graphs. GCNs over syntactic dependency trees are used as sentence encoders, producing latent feature representations of words in a sentence. We observe that GCN layers are complementary to LSTM ones: when we stack both GCN and LSTM layers, we obtain a substantial improvement over an already state-of-the-art LSTM SRL model, resulting in the best reported scores on the standard benchmark (CoNLL-2009) both for Chinese and English.
Anthology ID:
D17-1159
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1506–1515
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1159
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1159
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Diego Marcheggiani and Ivan Titov. 2017. Encoding Sentences with Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Role Labeling. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1506–1515, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Encoding Sentences with Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Role Labeling (Marcheggiani & Titov, EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1159.pdf
Attachment:
 D17-1159.Attachment.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/238232852
Code
 diegma/neural-dep-srl +  additional community code
Data
CoNLLCoNLL-2009