Papers › On the Benefit of Syntactic Supervision for Cross-lingual Transfer in Semantic Role Labeling

On the Benefit of Syntactic Supervision for Cross-lingual Transfer in Semantic Role Labeling

1 Nov 2021EMNLP 2021 11archive 2025-07-28

Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, Eduard Hovy

Although recent developments in neural architectures and pre-trained representations have greatly increased state-of-the-art model performance on fully-supervised semantic role labeling (SRL), the task remains challenging for languages where supervised SRL training data are not abundant. Cross-lingual learning can improve performance in this setting by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource ones. Moreover, we hypothesize that annotations of syntactic dependencies can be leveraged to further facilitate cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we perform an empirical exploration of the helpfulness of syntactic supervision for crosslingual SRL within a simple multitask learning scheme. With comprehensive evaluations across ten languages (in addition to English) and three SRL benchmark datasets, including both dependency- and span-based SRL, we show the effectiveness of syntactic supervision in low-resource scenarios.

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Cross-Lingual TransferSemantic Role Labeling

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