Effective QA-Driven Annotation of Predicate–Argument Relations Across Languages

Jonathan Davidov, Aviv Slobodkin, Shmuel Tomi Klein, Reut Tsarfaty, Ido Dagan, Ayal Klein


Abstract
Explicit representations of predicate-argument relations form the basis of interpretable semantic analysis, supporting reasoning, generation, and evaluation. However, attaining such semantic structures requires costly annotation efforts and has remained largely confined to English. We leverage the Question-Answer driven Semantic Role Labeling (QA-SRL) framework — a natural-language formulation of predicate-argument relations — as the foundation for extending semantic annotation to new languages. To this end, we introduce a cross-linguistic projection approach that reuses an English QA-SRL parser within a constrained translation and word-alignment pipeline to automatically generate question-answer annotations aligned with target-language predicates. Applied to Hebrew, Russian, and French — spanning diverse language families — the method yields high-quality training data and fine-tuned, language-specific parsers that outperform strong multilingual LLM baselines (GPT-4o, LLaMA-Maverick). By leveraging QA-SRL as a transferable natural-language interface for semantics, our approach enables efficient and broadly accessible predicate-argument parsing across languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2484–2502
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.112/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Davidov, Aviv Slobodkin, Shmuel Tomi Klein, Reut Tsarfaty, Ido Dagan, and Ayal Klein. 2026. Effective QA-Driven Annotation of Predicate–Argument Relations Across Languages. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2484–2502, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Effective QA-Driven Annotation of Predicate–Argument Relations Across Languages (Davidov et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.112.pdf