Syntax role for neural semantic role labeling

Abstract

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is dedicated to recognizing the semantic predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Previous studies in terms of traditional models have shown syntactic information can make remarkable contributions to SRL performance; however, the necessity of syntactic information was challenged by a few recent neural SRL studies that demonstrate impressive performance without syntactic backbones and suggest that syntax information becomes much less important for neural semantic role labeling, especially when paired with recent deep neural network and large-scale pre-trained language models. Despite this notion, the neural SRL field still lacks a systematic and full investigation on the relevance of syntactic information in SRL, for