Building a semantic role labelling system for Vietnamese

Authors: Thai-Hoang Pham; Xuan-Khoai Pham; Phuong Le-Hong

Abstract: Semantic role labelling (SRL) is a task in natural language processing which detects and classifies the semantic arguments associated with the predicates of a sentence. It is an important step towards understanding the meaning of a natural language. There exists SRL systems for well-studied languages like English, Chinese or Japanese but there is not any such system for the Vietnamese language. In this paper, we present the first SRL system for Vietnamese with encouraging accuracy. We first demonstrate that a simple application of SRL techniques developed for English could not give a good accuracy for Vietnamese. We then introduce a new algorithm for extracting candidate syntactic constituents, which is much more accurate than the common node-mapping algorithm usually used in the identification step. Finally, in the classification step, in addition to the common linguistic features, we propose novel and useful features for use in SRL. Our SRL system achieves an F1 score of 73.53% on the Vietnamese PropBank corpus. This system, including software and corpus, is available as an open source project and we believe that it is a good baseline for the development of future Vietnamese SRL systems.

Published in: 2015 Tenth International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM)

Date of Conference: 21-23 Oct. 2015

Publisher: IEEE

DOI: 10.1109/ICDIM.2015.7381877

Download: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7381877