Title: X-SRL: A Parallel Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling Dataset (Long paper)
Speaker: Angel Daza (ICL)
Abstract
Even though SRL is researched for many languages, major improvements have mostly been obtained for English, for which more resources are available. In fact, existing multilingual SRL datasets contain disparate annotation styles or come from different domains, hampering generalization in multilingual learning. In this work, we propose a method to automatically construct an SRL corpus that is parallel in four languages: English, French, German, Spanish, with unified predicate and role annotations that are fully comparable across languages. We apply high-quality machine translation to the English CoNLL-09 dataset and use multilingual BERT to project its high-quality annotations to the target languages. We include human-validated test sets that we use to measure the projection quality, and show that projection is denser and more precise than a strong baseline. Finally, we train different SOTA models on our novel corpus for mono- and multilingual SRL, showing that the multi-lingual annotations improve performance especially for the weaker languages.
Title: Centering-based Neural Coherence Modeling with Hierarchical Discourse Segments (Long paper)
Speaker: Sungho Jeon (HITS)
Abstract
Previous neural coherence models have focused on identifying semantic relations between adjacent sentences. However, they do not have the means to exploit structural information. In this work, we propose a coherence model which takes discourse structural information into account without relying on human annotations. We approximate a linguistic theory of coherence, Centering theory, which we use to track the changes of focus between discourse segments. Our model first identifies the focus of each sentence, recognized with regards to the context, and constructs the structural relationship for discourse segments by tracking the changes of the focus. The model then incorporates this structural information into a structure-aware transformer. We evaluate our model on two tasks, automated essay scoring and assessing writing quality. Our results demonstrate that our model, built on top of a pretrained language model, achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks. We next statistically examine the identified trees of texts assigned to different quality scores. Finally, we investigate what our model learns in terms of theoretical claims.
