Shallow Semantics

LING 2000 - 2006

NLP

2
Semantics and Pragmatics
High-level Linguistics (the good stuff!)

Semantics: the study of meaning that can be
determined from a sentence, phrase or word.

Pragmatics: the study of meaning, as it depends
on context (speaker, situation, dialogue
history)
LING 2000 - 2006


NLP

3
Language to (Simplistic) Logic
John went to the book store.
go(John, store1)
John bought a book.
buy(John,book1)
John gave the book to Mary.
give(John,book1,Mary)
Mary put the book on the table.
put(Mary,book1,on table1)

Whats missing?
Word sense disambiguation
Quantification
Coreference
Interpreting within a phrase
Many, many more issues

But its still more than you get from parsing!
Some problems in shallow semantics
1. Identifying entities
noun-phrase chunking
named-entity recognition
coreference resolution
(involves discourse/pragmatics too)
2. Identifying relationship names
Verb-phrase chunking
Predicate identification (step 0 of semantic role labeling)
Synonym resolution (e.g., get = receive)
3. Identifying arguments to predicates
Information extraction
Argument identification (step 1 of semantic role labeling)
4. Assigning semantic roles (step 2 of semantic role labeling)
5. Sentiment classification
That is, does the relationship express an opinion?
If so, is the opinion positive or negative?
1. Identifying Entities
Named Entity Tagging: Identify all the proper names in a text

Sally went to see Up in the Air at the local theater.
Person Film


Noun Phrase Chunking: Find all base noun phrases
(that is, noun phrases that dont have smaller noun phrases
nested inside them)

Sally went to see Up in the Air at the local theater on Elm Street.

1. Identifying Entities (2)
Parsing: Identify all phrase constituents, which
will of course include all noun phrases.


S
NP
VP
N
Sally
V NP PP
P NP
the theater at Up in the Air saw
NP
Elm St. on
PP
NP
P
1. Identifying Entities (3)
Coreference Resolution: Identify all references
(aka mentions) of people, places and things
in text, and determine which mentions are
co-referential.


John stuck his foot in his mouth.
2. Identifying relationship names
Verb phrase chunking: the commonest approach
Some issues:
1. Often, prepositions/particles belong with the relation name
Youre ticking me off.

2. Many relationships are expressed without a verb:
Jack Welch, CEO of GE,

3. Some verbs dont really express a meaningful relationship by themselves:
Jim is the father of 12 boys.

4. Verb sense disambiguation
5. Synonymy
ticking off = bothering
2. Identifying relationship names (2)
Synonym Resolution:
Discovery of Inference Rules from Text
(DIRT) (Lin and Pantel, 2001)

1. They collect millions of examples of

Subject Verb Object

triples by parsing a Web corpus.

2. For a pair of verbs, v1 and v2, they
compute mutual information scores
between
- the vector space model (VSM) for
subjects of v1 and the vector space
model for the subjects of v2
- the VSM for objects of v1 and VSM
for objects of v2

3. They cluster verbs with high MI scores
between them

give donate
many gift souls gift
. your
self
partner monthly
How to animal please hair
you gift many dollars
please blood you car
help life you money
members energy you today
See (Yates and Etzioni, JAIR 2009)
for a more recent approach
using probabilistic models.
5. Sentiment Classification
Given a review (about a movie, hotel, Amazon product, etc.), a
sentiment classification system tries to determine what
opinions are expressed in the review.

Coarse-level objective: is the review positive, negative, or
neutral overall?

Fine-grained objective: what are the positive aspects
(according to the reviewer), and what are the negative
aspects?

Question: what technique(s) would you use to solve these
two problems?
Semantic Role Labeling
a.k.a., Shallow Semantic Parsing
Semantic Role Labeling
Semantic role labeling is the computational task of
assigning semantic roles to phrases

Its usually divided into three subtasks:
1. Predicate identification
2. Argument Identification
3. Argument Classification -- assigning semantic roles








John broke the window with a hammer.
Pred
B-Arg B-Arg I-Arg B-Arg I-Arg I-Arg
Agent Patient
Means
(or instrument)
NLP

14
Same event - different sentences
John broke the window with a hammer.

John broke the window with the crack.

The hammer broke the window.

The window broke.
NLP

15
Same event - different syntactic frames

John broke the window with a hammer.
SUBJ VERB OBJ MODIFIER

John broke the window with the crack.
SUBJ VERB OBJ MODIFIER

The hammer broke the window.
SUBJ VERB OBJ

The window broke.
SUBJ VERB
NLP

16
Semantic role example
break(AGENT, INSTRUMENT, PATIENT)

AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT
John broke the window with a hammer.

INSTRUMENT PATIENT
The hammer broke the window.

PATIENT
The window broke.
Fillmore 68 - The case for case
NLP

17

AGENT PATIENT INSTRUMENT
John broke the window with a hammer.
SUBJ OBJ MODIFIER

INSTRUMENT PATIENT
The hammer broke the window.
SUBJ OBJ

PATIENT
The window broke.
SUBJ
Semantic roles
Semantic roles (or just roles) are slots, belonging to a
predicate, which arguments can fill.
- There are different naming conventions, but one common set of
names for semantic roles are agent, patient, means/instrument, .

Some constraints:
1. Only certain kinds of phrases can fill certain kinds of semantic
roles
with a crack will never be an agent
But many are ambiguous:
hammer patient or instrument?
2. Syntax provides a clue, but it is not the full answer
Subject Agent? Patient? Instrument?


Slot Filling
Pred
John
broke
the window
with a
hammer
Agent
Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Phrases Slots
Argument Classification
Slot Filling
Pred
The
hammer
broke
the window
Agent
Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Phrases Slots
Argument Classification
Slot Filling
Pred
The
window
broke
Agent
Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Phrases Slots
Argument Classification
Slot Filling and Shallow Semantics
Pred
John
broke
the window
with a
hammer
Agent
Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Phrases Slots
Shallow
Semantics
broke(John, the window, with a hammer)
Pred Agent Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Slot Filling and Shallow Semantics
Pred
broke
The window
Agent
Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Phrases Slots
Shallow
Semantics
broke( ?x , the window, ?y )
Pred Agent Patient
Means
(or instrument)
Semantic Role Labeling
Techniques
Semantic Role Labeling Techniques
Well cover 3 approaches to SRL
1. Basic (Gildea and Jurafsky, Comp. Ling. 2003)

2. Joint inference for argument structure (Toutanova
et al., Comp. Ling. 2008)

3. Open-domain (Huang and Yates, ACL 2010)
1. Gildea and Jurafsky
Main idea: start with parse tree, and try to identify constituents that are arguments.
G&J (1)
Build a (probabilistic) classifier for predicting:
- for each constituent, which role is it?
- Essentially, a maximum-entropy classifier, although its not described
that way

Features for Argument Classification:
1. Phrase type of constituent
2. Governing category of NPs S or VP (differentiates between
subjects and objects)
3. Position w.r.t. predicate (before or after)
4. Voice of predicate (active or passive verb)
5. Head word of constituent
6. Parse tree path between predicate and constituent
G&J (2) Parse Tree Path Feature
Parse tree path (or just path) feature:

Determines the syntactic relationship
between predicate and current constituent.


In this example, path feature:

VB VP S NP
G&J (3)
4086 possible values of the Path feature in training data.
A sparse feature!
G&J (4)
Build a (probabilistic) classifier for predicting:
- for each constituent, which role is it?
- Essentially, a maximum-entropy classifier, although its not
described that way

Features for Argument Identification:
1. Predicate word
2. Head word of constituent
3. Parse tree path between predicate and constituent
G&J (5): Results
Task Best Result
Argument Identification (only) 92% prec., 86% rec., .89 F1
Argument Classification (only) 78.5% assigned correct role
2. Toutanova, Haghighi, and Manning
A Global Joint Model for SRL (Comp. Ling., 2008)

Main idea(s):
Include features that depend on multiple
arguments
Use multiple parsers as input, for robustness
THM (1): Motivation
1. The day that the ogre cooked the children is still remembered.

2. The meal that the ogre cooked the children is still remembered.

Both sentences have identical syntax.
They differ in only 1 word (day vs. meal).

If we classify arguments 1 at a time, the children will be labeled the same
thing in both cases.

But in (1), the children is the Patient (thing being cooked).
And in (2), the children is the Beneficiary (people for whom the cooking is
done).

Intuitively, we cant classify these arguments independently.
THM(2): Features
Features:
1. Whole label sequence
1. [voice:active, Arg1, pred, Arg4, ArgM-TMP]
2. [voice:active, lemma:accelerated, Arg1, pred, Arg4, ArgM-TMP]
3. [voice:active, lemma:accelerated, Arg1, pred, Arg4] (no adjuncts)
4. [voice:active, lemma:accelerated, Arg, pred, Arg] (no adjuncts, no #s)
2. Syntax and semantics in the label sequence
1. [voice:active, NP-Arg1, pred, PP-Arg4]
2. [voice:active, lemma:accelerated, NP-Arg1, pred, PP-Arg4]
3. Repetition features: whether Arg1 (for example) appears multiple times
THM(3): Classifier
First, for each sentence, obtain the top-10
most likely parse tree/semantic role label
outputs from G&J
Build a max-ent classifier to select from these
10, using the features above
Also, include top-10 parses from the Charniak
parser
THM(4): Results
These are on a different data set from G&J, so
results not directly comparable. But the local
model is similar to G&J, so think of that as the
comparison.
Model WSJ (ID & CLS) Brown (ID & CLS)
Local 78.00 65.55
Joint (1 parse) 79.71 67.79
Joint (top 5 parses) 80.32 68.81
Results show F1 scores for IDentification and CLaSsification of arguments together.
WSJ is the Wall Street Journal test set, a collection of approximately 4,000 news
sentences.
Brown is a smaller collection of fiction stories.
The system is trained on a separate set of WSJ sentences.
3. Huang and Yates
Open-Domain SRL by Modeling Word Spans, ACL 2010

Main Idea:
One of the biggest problems for SRL systems is that
they need lexical features to classify arguments, but
lexical features are sparse.

We build a simple SRL system that outperforms the
previous state-of-the-art on out-of-domain data, by
learning new lexical representations.
Simple, open-domain SRL
Chris broke the window with a hammer
Proper
Noun
Verb Det. Noun Prep. Det. Noun
B-NP B-VP B-NP I-NP B-PP B-NP I-NP
-1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5
POS tag
Chunk tag
dist. from
predicate
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Baseline Features
HMM label
Simple, open-domain SRL
Chris broke the window with a hammer
Proper
Noun
Verb Det. Noun Prep. Det. Noun
B-NP B-VP B-NP I-NP B-PP B-NP I-NP
-1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5
POS tag
Chunk tag
dist. from
predicate
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Baseline +HMM
The importance of paths

Chris [
predicate
broke] [
thing broken
a hammer]

Chris [
predicate
broke] a window with [
means
a
hammer]

Chris [
predicate
broke] the desk, so she fetched
[
not an arg
a hammer] and nails.

Simple, open-domain SRL
Chris broke the window with a hammer
None None None the
the-
window
the-
window-
with
the-
window-
with-a
Word path
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Baseline +HMM + Paths
Simple, open-domain SRL
Chris broke the window with a hammer
None None None the
the-
window
the-
window-
with
the-
window-
with-a
Word path
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Baseline +HMM + Paths
Det Det-Noun
Det-
Noun-
Prep
Det-
Noun-
Prep-Det
POS path
None None None
Simple, open-domain SRL
Chris broke the window with a hammer
None None None the
the-
window
the-
window-
with
the-
window-
with-a
Word path
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Baseline +HMM + Paths
Det Det-Noun
Det-
Noun-
Prep
Det-
Noun-
Prep-Det
POS path
None None None
HMM path None None None
Experimental results F1
All systems were trained on newswire text from the Wall Street Journal
(WSJ), and tested on WSJ and fiction texts from the Brown corpus (Brown).
0.672
0.729
0.750
0.617
0.655
0.677
0.50
0.55
0.60
0.65
0.70
0.75
0.80
0.85
WSJ
Brown
Experimental results F1
All systems were trained on newswire text from the Wall Street Journal
(WSJ), and tested on WSJ and fiction texts from the Brown corpus (Brown).
0.672
0.729
0.750
0.808
0.786
0.794
0.617
0.655
0.677
0.688
0.684
0.678
0.50
0.55
0.60
0.65
0.70
0.75
0.80
0.85
WSJ
Brown
Span-HMMs

Span-HMM features
Chris broke the window with a hammer
Span-HMM for
hammer
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Span-HMM Features
Span-HMM feature
Span-HMM features
Chris broke the window with a hammer
Span-HMM for
hammer
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Span-HMM Features
Span-HMM feature
Span-HMM features
Chris broke the window with a hammer
Span-HMM for a
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Span-HMM Features
Span-HMM feature
Span-HMM features
Chris broke the window with a hammer
Span-HMM for a
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Span-HMM Features
Span-HMM feature
Span-HMM features
Chris broke the window with a hammer
SRL Label Breaker Pred Thing Broken Means
Span-HMM Features
Span-HMM feature
None None None
Experimental results SRL F1
All systems were trained on newswire text from the Wall Street Journal
(WSJ), and tested on WSJ and fiction texts from the Brown corpus (Brown).
0.750
0.808
0.786
0.794
0.786
0.792
0.677
0.688
0.684
0.678
0.718
0.731
0.50
0.55
0.60
0.65
0.70
0.75
0.80
0.85
WSJ
Brown
Experimental results feature
sparsity
Benefit grows with distance from predicate