End-To-End Learning Of Semantic Role Labeling Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is one of the basic natural language processing (NLP) problems. To this date, most of the successful SRL systems were built on top of some form of parsing results (Koomen et al., 2005; Palmer et al., 2010; Pradhan et al., 2013), where pre-defined feature templates over the syntactic structure are used. The attempts of building an end-to-end SRL learning system without using parsing were less successful (Collobert et al., 2011). In this work, we propose to use deep bi-directional recurrent network as an end-to-end system for SRL. We take only original text information as input feature, without using any syntactic knowledge. The proposed algorithm for semantic role labeling was mainly evaluated on CoNLL-2005 shared task and achieved F-1 score of 81.07. This result outperforms the previous state-of-the-art system from the combination of different parsing trees or models. We also obtained the same conclusion with F-1 = 81.27 on CoNLL-2012 shared task. As a result of simplicity, our model is also computationally efficient that the parsing speed is 6.7k tokens per second. Our analysis shows that our model is better at handling longer sentences than traditional models. And the latent variables of our model implicitly capture the syntactic structure of a sentence.