Unsupervised Semantic Role Induction with Graph Partitioning

Joel Lang, Mirella Lapata

Abstract: In this paper we present a method for unsupervised semantic role induction which we formalize as a graph partitioning problem. Argument instances of a verb are represented as vertices in a graph whose edge weights quantify their role-semantic similarity. Graph partitioning is realized with an algorithm that iteratively assigns vertices to clusters based on the cluster assignments of neighboring vertices. Our method is algorithmically and conceptually simple, especially with respect to how problem-specific knowledge is incorporated into the model. Experimental results on the CoNLL 2008 benchmark dataset demonstrate that our model is competitive with other unsupervised approaches in terms of F1 whilst attaining significantly higher cluster purity.