Natural Language Analysis contains three components: Lexical Analysis, Syntactic Analysis, and Semantic Analysis. Semantic Role Labelling (SRL) is one way for Shallow Semantic Analysis. A predicate of a sentence is seen as a property that a subject has or is characterized by, such as what it does, what it is or how it is, which mostly corresponds to the core of an event. The noun associated with predicate is called Arugment. Sementic roles express the abstract roles that arguments of a predicate can take in the event, such as Agent, Patient, Theme, Experiencer, Beneficiary, Instrument, Location, Goal and Source etc.
In the following example, “遇到” is Predicate (“Pred”)，“小明” is Agent，“小红” is Patient，“昨天” means when the event occurs (Time), and “公园” means where the event occurs (Location).
Instead of in-depth analysis on semantic information, the goal of Semantic Role Labeling is to identify the relation of predicate and other constituents, e.g., predicate-argument structure, as specific semantic roles, which is an important intermediate step in a wide range of natural language understanding tasks (Information Extraction, Discourse Analysis, DeepQA etc). Predicates are always assumed to be given, the only thing is to identify arguments and their semantic roles.
Standard SRL system mostly build on top of Syntactic Analysis and contains 5 steps:
1. Construct a syntactic parse tree, as shown in Fig. 1
2. Identity candidate arguments of given predicate from constructed syntactic parse tree.
3. Prune most unlikely candidate arguments.
4. Identify argument, which is usually solved as a binary classification problem.
5. Multi-class semantic role labeling. Steps 2-3 usually introduce hand-designed features based on Syntactic Analysis (step 1).
However, complete syntactic analysis requires to identify the relation among all constitutes and the performance of SRL is sensitive to the precision of syntactic analysis, which make SRL a very challenging task. In order to reduce the complexity and obtain some syntactic structure information, shallow syntactic analysis is proposed. Shallow Syntactic Analysis is also called partial parsing or chunking. Unlike complete syntactic analysis which requires constructing complete parsing tree, Shallow Syntactic Analysis only need to identify some idependent components with relatively simple structure, such as verb phrases (chunk). In order to avoid constructing syntactic tree with high accuracy, some work\[[1](#Reference)\] proposed semantic chunking based SRL methods, which convert SRL as a sequence tagging problem. Sequence tagging tasks classify syntactic chunks using BIO representation. For syntactic chunks forming a chunk of type A, the first chunk receives the B-A tag (Begin), the remaining ones receive the tag I-A (Inside), and all chunks outside receive the tag O-A.
The BIO representation of above example is shown in Fig.1.
This example illustrates the simplicity of sequence tagging because (1) shallow syntactic analysis reduces precision requirement of syntactic analysis; (2) pruning candidate arguments is removed; 3) argument identification and tagging are finished at the same time. Such unified methods simplify the precedure, reduce the risk of accumulating errors and boost the performance further.
In this tutorial, our SRL system is built as an end-to-end system via neural network. We take only text sequences, without using any syntactic parsing results or complex hand-designed features. We give public dataset [CoNLL-2004 and CoNLL-2005 Shared Tasks](http://www.cs.upc.edu/~srlconll/) as an example to illustrate: given a sentence and it's predicates, identify the corresponding arguments and their semantic roles by sequence tagging method.
## Model
Recurrent Nerual Networks are important tools for sequence modeling and have been successfully used in some natural language processing tasks. Unlike Feed-forward neural netowrks, RNNs can model the dependency between elements of sequences. LSTMs as variants of RNNs aim to model long-term dependency in long sequences. We have introduced this in [understand_sentiment](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/book/tree/develop/understand_sentiment). In this chapter, we continue to use LSTMs to solve SRL problems.
### Stacked Recurrent Neural Network
Deep Neural Networks allows to extract hierarchical represetations, higher layer can form more abstract/complex representations on top of lower layers. LSTMs when unfolded in time is deep, because a computational path between the input at time $k < t$ to the output at time $t$ crosses several nonlinear layers. However, the computation carried out at each time-step is only linear transformation, which makes LSTMs a shallow model. Deep LSTMs are typically constructed by stacking multiple LSTM layers on top of each other and taking the output from lower LSTM layer at time $t$ as the input of upper LSTM layer at time $t$. Deep, hierarchical nerual networks can be much efficient at representing some functions and modeling varying-length dependencies\[[2](#Reference)\].
However, deep LSTMs increases the number of nonlinear steps the gradient has to traverse when propagated back in depth. For example, 4 layer LSTMs can be trained properly, but the performance becomes worse as the number of layers up to 4-8. Conventional LSTMs prevent backpropagated errors from vanishing and exploding by introduce shortcut connections to skip the intermediate nonlinear layers. Therefore, deep LSTMs can consider shortcut connections in depth as well.
The operation of a single LSTM cell contain 3 parts: (1) input-to-hidden: map input $x$ to the input of forget gates, input gates, memory cells and output gates by linear transformation (i.e., matrix mapping); (2) hidden-to-hidden: calculate forget gates, input gates, output gates and update memory cell, this is the main part of LSTMs; (3)hidden-to-output: this part typically involves an activation operation on hidden states. Based on the above stacked LSTMs, we add a shortcut connection: take the input-to-hidden from previous layer as a new input and learn another linear transfermation.
Fig.3 illustrate the final stacked recurrent neural networks.
LSTMs can summarize the history of previous inputs seen up to now, but can not see the future. In most of natural language processing tasks, the entire sentences are ready to use. Therefore, sequencal learning might be much effecient if the future can be encoded as well like histories.
To address the above drawbacks, we can design bidirectional recurrent neural networks by making a minor modification. Higher LSTM layers process the sequence in reversed direction with previous lower LSTM layers, i.e., Deep LSTMs operate from left-to-right, right-to-left, left-to-right,..., in depth. Therefore, LSTM layers at time-step $t$ can see both histories and the future since the second layer. Fig. 4 illustrates the bidirectional recurrent neural networks.
反向处理上一层序列-> process sequence from previous layer in backward direction
Note that, this bidirectional RNNs is different with the one proposed by Bengio et al in machine translation tasks \[[3](#Reference), [4](#Reference)\]. We will introduce another bidirectional RNNs in the following tasks[machine translation](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/book/blob/develop/machine_translation/README.md)
### Conditional Random Field
The basic pipeline of Neural Networks solving problems is 1) all lower layers aim to learn representations; 2) the top layer is designed for learning the final task. In SRL tasks, CRF is built on top of the network for the final tag sequence prediction. It takes the representations provided by the last LSTM layer as input.
CRF is a probabilistic graph model (undirected) with nodes denoting random variables and edges denoting dependencies between nodes. To be simplicity, CRFs learn conditional probability $P(Y|X)$, where $X = (x_1, x_2, ... , x_n)$ are sequences of input, $Y = (y_1, y_2, ... , y_n)$ are label sequences; Decoding is to search sequence $Y$ to maximize conditional probability $P(Y|X)$, i.e., $Y^* = \mbox{arg max}_{Y} P(Y | X)$。
Sequence tagging tasks only consider input and output as linear sequences without extra dependent assumptions on graph model. Thus, the graph model of sequence tagging tasks is simple chain or line, which results in a Linear Chain Conditional Random Field, shown in Fig.5.
where, $Z(X)$ is normalization constant, $t_j$ is feature function defined on edges, called transition feature, depending on $y_i$ and $y_{i-1}$ which represents transition probabilities from $y_{i-1}$ to $y_i$ given input sequence $X$. $s_k$ is feature function defined on nodes, called state feature, depending on $y_i$ and represents the probality of $y_i$ given input sequence $X$. $\lambda_j$ 和 $\mu_k$ are weights corresponding to $t_j$ and $s_k$. Actually, $t$ and $s$ can be wrtten in the same form, then take summation over all nodes $i$: $f_{k}(Y, X) = \sum_{i=1}^{n}f_k({y_{i - 1}, y_i, X, i})$, $f$ is defined as feature function. Thus, $P(Y|X)$ can be wrtten as:
$\omega$ are weights of feature function which should be learned in CRF models. At training stage, given input sequences and label sequences $D = \left[(X_1, Y_1), (X_2 , Y_2) , ... , (X_N, Y_N)\right]$, solve following objective function using MLE:
$$L(\lambda, D) = - \text{log}\left(\prod_{m=1}^{N}p(Y_m|X_m, W)\right) + C \frac{1}{2}\lVert W\rVert^{2}$$
This objective function can be solved via back-propagation in an end-to-end manner. At decoding stage, given input sequences $X$, search sequence $\bar{Y}$ to maximize conditional probability $\bar{P}(Y|X)$ via decoding methods (such as Viterbi, Beam Search).
### DB-LSTM SRL model
Given predicates and a sentence, SRL tasks aim to identify arguments of the given predicate and their semantic roles. If a sequence has n predicates, we will process this sequence n times. One model is as follows:
1. Construct inputs;
- output 1: predicate, output 2: sentence
- expand input 1 as a sequence with the same length with input 2 using one-hot representation;
2. Convert one-hot sequences from step 1 to real-vector sequences via lookup table;
3. Learn the representation of input sequences by taking real-vector sequences from step 2 as inputs;
4. Take representations from step 3 as inputs, label sequence as supervision signal, do sequence tagging tasks
We can try above method. Here, we propose some modifications by introducing two simple but effective features:
- predicate context (ctx-p): A single predicate word can not exactly describe the predicate information, especially when the same words appear more than one times in a sentence. With the expanded context, the ambiguity can be largely eliminated. Thus, we extract $n$ words before and after predicate to construct a window chunk.
- region mark ($m_r$): $m_r = 1$ to denote the argument position if it locates in the predicate context region, or $m_r = 0$ if not.
After modification, the model is as follows:
1. Construct inputs
- input 1: sentence, input 2: predicate sequence, input 3: predicate context, extract $n$ words before and after predicate and get one-hot representation, input 4: region mark, annotate argument position if it locates in the predicate context region
- expand input 2~3 as sequences with the same length with input 1
2. Convert input 1~4 to real-vector sequences via lookup table; input 1 and 3 share the same lookup table, input 2 and 4 have separate lookup tables
3. Take four real-vector sequences from step 2 as inputs of bidirectional LSTMs; Train LSTMs to update representations
4. Take representation from step 3 as input of CRF, label sequence as supervision signal, do sequence tagging tasks
预测结束后，在 - o 参数所指定的标记结果文件中，我们会得到如下格式的输出：每行是一条样本，以 “\t” 分隔的 2 列，第一列是输入文本，第二列是标记的结果。通过BIO标记可以直接得到论元的语义角色标签。
```text
The interest-only securities were priced at 35 1\/2 to yield 10.72 % . B-A0 I-A0 I-A0 O O O O O O B-V B-A1 I-A1 O
```
## Conclusion
Semantic Role Labeling is an important intermediate step in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. In this tutorial, we give SRL as an example to introduce how to use PaddlePaddle to do sequence tagging tasks. Proposed models are from our published paper\[[10](#Reference)\]. We only use test data as illustration since train data on CoNLL 2005 dataset is not completely public. We hope to propose an end-to-end neural network model with less dependencies on natural language processing tools, but is comparable, or even better than trandional models. Please check out our paper for more information and discussions.
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