SapienzaNLP @ NAACL 2021
3 papers accepted on Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling and Semantic Parsing!
Here are our latest papers at NAACL 2021:
- ESC: Redesigning WSD with Extractive Sense Comprehension
- [Outstanding paper award] Unifying Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with Heterogeneous Linguistic Resources
- SGL: Speaking the Graph Languages of Semantic Parsing via Multilingual Translation
ESC: Redesigning WSD with Extractive Sense Comprehension
by Edoardo Barba, Tommaso Pasini and Roberto Navigli
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is a historical NLP task aimed at linking words in contexts to discrete sense inventories and it is usually cast as a multi-label classification task. Recently, several neural approaches have employed sense definitions to better represent word meanings. Yet, these approaches do not observe the input sentence and the sense definition candidates all at once, thus potentially reducing the model performance and generalization power. We cope with this issue by reframing WSD as a span extraction problem—which we called Extractive Sense Comprehension (ESC)—and propose ESCHER, a transformer-based neural architecture for this new formulation. By means of an extensive array of experiments, we show that ESC unleashes the full potential of our model, leading it to outdo all of its competitors and to set a new state of the art on the English WSD task. In the few-shot scenario, ESCHER proves to exploit training data efficiently, attaining the same performance as its closest competitor while relying on almost three times fewer annotations. Furthermore, ESCHER can nimbly combine data annotated with senses from different lexical resources, achieving performances that were previously out of everyone’s reach.
Unifying Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with Heterogeneous Linguistic Resources
by Simone Conia, Andrea Bacciu and Roberto Navigli
While cross-lingual techniques are finding increasing success in a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks, their application to Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) has been strongly limited by the fact that each language adopts its own linguistic formalism, from PropBank for English to AnCora for Spanish and PDT-Vallex for Czech, inter alia. In this work, we address this issue and present a unified model to perform cross-lingual SRL over heterogeneous linguistic resources. Our model implicitly learns a high-quality mapping for different formalisms across diverse languages without resorting to word alignment and/or translation techniques. We find that, not only is our cross-lingual system competitive with the current state of the art but that it is also robust to low-data scenarios. Most interestingly, our unified model is able to annotate a sentence in a single forward pass with all the inventories it was trained with, providing a tool for the analysis and comparison of linguistic theories across different languages.
SGL: Speaking the Graph Languages of Semantic Parsing via Multilingual Translation
by Luigi Procopio, Rocco Tripodi and Roberto Navigli
Graph-based semantic parsing aims to represent textual meaning through directed graphs. As one of the most promising general-purpose meaning representations, these structures and their parsing have gained a significant interest momentum during recent years, with several diverse formalisms being proposed. Yet, owing to this very heterogeneity, most of the research effort has focused mainly on solutions specific to a given formalism. In this work, instead, we reframe semantic parsing towards multiple formalisms as Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT), and propose SGL, a many-to-many seq2seq architecture trained with an MNMT objective. Backed by several experiments, we show that this framework is indeed effective once the learning procedure is enhanced with large parallel corpora coming from Machine Translation: we report competitive performances on AMR and UCCA parsing, especially once paired with pre-trained architectures. Furthermore, we find that models trained under this configuration scale remarkably well to tasks such as cross-lingual AMR parsing: SGL outperforms all its competitors by a large margin without even explicitly seeing non-English to AMR examples at training time and, once these examples are included as well, sets an unprecedented state of the art in this task.