Span-based Semantic Role Labeling as Lexicalized Constituency Tree Parsing

Yang Hou, Zhenghua Li


Abstract
Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is a critical task that focuses on identifying predicate-argument structures in sentences. Span-based SRL, a prominent paradigm, is often tackled using BIO-based or graph-based methods. However, these approaches often fail to capture the inherent relationship between syntax and semantics. While syntax-aware models have been proposed to address this limitation, they heavily rely on pre-existing syntactic resources, limiting their general applicability. In this work, we propose a lexicalized tree representation for span-based SRL, which integrates constituency and dependency parsing to explicitly model predicate-argument structures. By structurally representing predicates as roots and arguments as subtrees directly linked to the predicate, our approach bridges the gap between syntactic and semantic representations. Experiments on standard English benchmarks (CoNLL05 and CoNLL12) demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance, with particular improvement in predicate-given settings.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.557
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10701–10713
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.557/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Hou and Zhenghua Li. 2025. Span-based Semantic Role Labeling as Lexicalized Constituency Tree Parsing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 10701–10713, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Span-based Semantic Role Labeling as Lexicalized Constituency Tree Parsing (Hou & Li, Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.557.pdf