English

Conversational Semantic Role Labeling

Computation and Language 2021-04-13 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to extract the arguments for each predicate in an input sentence. Traditional SRL can fail to analyze dialogues because it only works on every single sentence, while ellipsis and anaphora frequently occur in dialogues. To address this problem, we propose the conversational SRL task, where an argument can be the dialogue participants, a phrase in the dialogue history or the current sentence. As the existing SRL datasets are in the sentence level, we manually annotate semantic roles for 3,000 chit-chat dialogues (27,198 sentences) to boost the research in this direction. Experiments show that while traditional SRL systems (even with the help of coreference resolution or rewriting) perform poorly for analyzing dialogues, modeling dialogue histories and participants greatly helps the performance, indicating that adapting SRL to conversations is very promising for universal dialogue understanding. Our initial study by applying CSRL to two mainstream conversational tasks, dialogue response generation and dialogue context rewriting, also confirms the usefulness of CSRL.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.04947,
  title  = {Conversational Semantic Role Labeling},
  author = {Kun Xu and Han Wu and Linfeng Song and Haisong Zhang and Linqi Song and Dong Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.04947},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted by TASLP. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2010.01417

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:02:56.353Z