Domain adaptation of SRL systems for biological processes

Abstract

Domain adaptation remains one of the most challenging aspects in the wide-spread use of Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) systems. Current state-of-the-art methods are typically trained on large-scale datasets, but their performances do not directly transfer to low-resource domain-specific settings. In this paper, we propose two approaches for domain adaptation in biological domain that involve pre-training LSTM-CRF based on existing large-scale datasets and adapting it for a low-resource corpus of biological processes. Our first approach defines a mapping between the source labels and the target labels, and the other approach modifies the final CRF layer in sequence-labeling neural network architecture. We perform our experiments on ProcessBank (Berant et al., 2014) dataset which contains less than 200 paragraphs on biological processes. We improve over the previous state-of-the-art system on this dataset by 21 F1 points. We also show that, by incorporating event-event relationship in ProcessBank, we are able to achieve an additional 2.6 F1 gain, giving us possible insights into how to improve SRL systems for biological process using richer annotations.