Syntax-Aware Graph-to-Graph Transformer for Semantic Role Labelling

Abstract

The goal of semantic role labelling (SRL) is to recognise the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Recent models have shown that syntactic information can enhance the SRL performance, but other syntax-agnostic approaches achieved reasonable performance. The best way to encode syntactic information for the SRL task is still an open question. In this paper, we propose the Syntax-aware Graph-to-Graph Transformer (SynG2G-Tr) architecture, which encodes the syntactic structure with a novel way to input graph relations as embeddings directly into the self-attention mechanism of Transformer. This approach adds a soft bias towards attention patterns that follow the syntactic structure but also allows the model to use this information to learn alternative patterns. We evaluate our model on both dependencybased and span-based SRL datasets, and outperform all previous syntax-aware and syntax-agnostic models in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, on the CoNLL 2005 and CoNLL 2009 datasets. Our architecture is general and can be applied to encode any graph information for a desired downstream task.