Abstract
The Chinese Proposition Bank (CPB) is a corpus annotated with semantic roles for the arguments of verbal and nominalized predicates. The semantic roles for the core arguments are defined in a predicate-specific manner. That is, a set of semantic roles, numerically identified, are defined for each sense of a predicate lemma and recorded in a valency lexicon called frame files. The predicate-specific manner in which the semantic roles are defined reduces the cognitive burden on the annotators since they only need to internalize a few roles at a time and this has contributed to the consistency in annotation. It was also a sensible approach given the contentious issue of how many semantic roles are needed if one were to adopt of set of global semantic roles that apply to all predicates. A downside of this approach, however, is that the predicate-specific roles may not be consistent across predicates, and this inconsistency has a negative impact on training automatic systems. Given the progress that has been made in defining semantic roles in the last decade or so, time is ripe for adopting a set of general semantic roles. In this article, we describe our effort to “re-annotate” the CPB with a set of “global” semantic roles that are predicate-independent and investigate their impact on automatic semantic role labeling systems. When defining these global semantic roles, we strive to make them compatible with a recently published ISO standards on the annotation of semantic roles (ISO 24617-4:2014 SemAF-SR) while taking the linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language into account. We show that in spite of the much larger number of global semantic roles, the accuracy of an off-the-shelf semantic role labeling system retrained on the data re-annotated with global semantic roles is comparable to that trained on the data set with the original predicate-specific semantic roles. We also argue that the re-annotated data set, together with the original data, provides the user with more flexibility when using the corpus.
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Notes
Here “obligatory” does not mean that they have to be realized syntactically as in some cases they clearly can be dropped.
An exception is made for arguments involving a coordination construction where one might argue there are multiple arguments playing the same role. For example in “
/xiaozhang 
/yesterday 
/and 
/xiaowang 
/together 
/go to school (Xiaozhang and Xiaowang went to school together yesterday)”, “
” and “
” are both Agent. Alternatively one might say that coordinating conjunctions allow the conjuncts to collectively play the same role, and therefore the semantic roles are still unique.
/xiaozhang 
/yesterday 
/and 
/xiaowang 
/together 
/go to school (Xiaozhang and Xiaowang went to school together yesterday)”, “
” and “
” are both Agent. Alternatively one might say that coordinating conjunctions allow the conjuncts to collectively play the same role, and therefore the semantic roles are still unique.References
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This work is funded by the DAPRA via contract HR0011-11-C-0145 entitled “Linguistic Resources for Multilingual Processing”. All opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA.
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Bai, X., Xue, N. Generalizing the semantic roles in the Chinese Proposition Bank. Lang Resources & Evaluation 50, 643–666 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9342-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-016-9342-y