Better Combine Them Together! Integrating Syntactic Constituency and Dependency Representations for Semantic Role Labeling

Abstract

Structural syntax knowledge has been proven effective for semantic role labeling (SRL), while existing works mostly use only one singleton syntax, such as either syntactic dependency or constituency tree. In this paper, we explore the integration of heterogeneous syntactic representations for SRL. We first consider a TreeLSTM-based integration, collaboratively learning the phrasal boundaries from the constituency and the semantic relations from dependency. We further introduce a label-aware GCN solution for simultaneously modeling the syntactic edges and labels. Experimental results demonstrate that by effectively combining the heterogeneous syntactic representations, our methods yield task improvements on both span-based and dependency-based SRL. Also our system achieves new state-of-the-art SRL performances, meanwhile bringing explainable task improvements.