A Comparison of Alternative Parse Tree Paths for Labeling Semantic Roles.pdf

A Comparison of Alternative Parse Tree Paths for Labeling Semantic Roles Reid Swanson and Andrew S. Gordon Institute for Creative Technologies University of Southern California 13274 Fiji Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292 USA swansonr@ict.usc.edu, gordon@ict.usc.edu Abstract The integration of sophisticated infer- ence-based techniques into natural lan- guage processing applications first re- quires a reliable method of encoding the predicate-argument structure of the pro- positional content of text. Recent statisti- cal approaches to automated predicate- argument annotation have utilized parse tree paths as predictive features, which encode the path between a verb predicate and a node in the parse tree that governs its argument. In this paper, we explore a number of alternatives for how these parse tree paths are encoded, focusing on the difference between automatically generated constituency parses and de- pendency parses. After describing five al- ternatives for encoding parse tree paths, we investigate how well each can be aligned with the argument substrings in annotated text corpora, their relative pre- cision and recall performance, and their comparative learning curves. Results in- dicate that constituency parsers produce parse tree paths that can more easily be aligned to argument substrings, perform better in precision and recall, and have more favorable learning curves than those produced by a dependency parser. 1 Introduction A persistent goal of natural language processing research has been the automated transformation of natural language texts into representations that unambiguously encode their propositional content in formal notation. Increasingly, first- order predicate calculus representations of textual meaning have been used in natural lanugage processing applications that involve automated inference. For example, Moldovan et al. (2003) demonstrate how predicate-argument formulations of questions and cand