Unsupervised induction of semantic roles

  • Authors:
  • Joel Lang;Mirella Lapata

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK;University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

  • Venue:
  • HLT '10 Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Datasets annotated with semantic roles are an important prerequisite to developing high-performance role labeling systems. Unfortunately, the reliance on manual annotations, which are both difficult and highly expensive to produce, presents a major obstacle to the widespread application of these systems across different languages and text genres. In this paper we describe a method for inducing the semantic roles of verbal arguments directly from unannotated text. We formulate the role induction problem as one of detecting alternations and finding a canonical syntactic form for them. Both steps are implemented in a novel probabilistic model, a latent-variable variant of the logistic classifier. Our method increases the purity of the induced role clusters by a wide margin over a strong baseline.