Polyglot semantic role labeling

Abstract

Previous approaches to multilingual semantic dependency parsing treat languages independently, without exploiting the similarities between semantic structures across languages. We experiment with a new approach where we combine resources from a pair of languages in the CoNLL 2009 shared task (Hajič et al., 2009) to build a polyglot semantic role la-beler. Notwithstanding the absence of parallel data, and the dissimilarity in annotations between languages, our approach results in an improvement in SRL performance on multiple languages over a monolingual baseline. Analysis of the polyglot model shows it to be advantageous in lower-resource settings.