Starting from Scratch in Semantic Role Labeling

A fundamental step in sentence comprehension involves assigning semantic roles to sentence constituents. To accomplish this, the listener must parse the sentence, find constituents that are candidate arguments, and assign semantic roles to those constituents. Each step depends on prior lexical and syntactic knowledge. Where do children learning their first languages begin in solving this problem? In this paper we focus on the parsing and argument-identification steps that precede Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) training. We combine a simplified SRL with an un-supervised HMM part of speech tagger, and experiment with psycholinguistically-motivated ways to label clusters resulting from the HMM so that they can be used to parse input for the SRL system. The results show that proposed shallow representations of sentence structure are robust to reductions in parsing accuracy, and that the contribution of alternative representations of sentence structure to successful semantic role labeling varies with the integrity of the parsing and argument-identification stages.