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Automatic semi-supervised semantic role labeling for Brazilian Portuguese

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Author(s):
Fernando Emilio Alva Manchego
Total Authors: 1
Document type: Master's Dissertation
Press: São Carlos.
Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC/SB)
Defense date:
Examining board members:
João Luis Garcia Rosa; Sandra Maria Aluisio; Bento Carlos Dias da Silva
Advisor: João Luis Garcia Rosa
Abstract

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a natural language processing (NLP) task able to analyze part of the meaning of sentences through the detection of the events they describe and the participants involved, which is essential for computers to eectively understand the information coded in text. Most of the research carried out in SRL has been done for texts in English, considering the grammatical and semantic particularities of that language, which prevents those tools and results to be directly transported to other languages such as Portuguese. Most current SRL systems use supervised machine learning methods and require a big corpus of sentences annotated with semantic roles in order to learn how to perform the task properly. For Brazilian Portuguese, a lexical resource that provides this type of information has recently become available: PropBank.Br. However, in comparison with corpora for other languages such as English, the corpus provided by that project is small and it wouldn\'t allow a supervised classier to perform the labeling task with good performance. To deal with this problem, in this dissertation we use a semi-supervised approach capable of extracting relevant information both from annotated and non-annotated data available, making it less dependent on the training corpus. We implemented the self-training algorithm with logistic regression (or maximum entropy) models as base classier to label the corpus Bosque (section CETENFolha) from the Floresta Sintá(c)tica with the PropBank.Br semantic role tags. To the original algorithm, we incorporated balancing and similarity measures between verb-specic arguments so as to improve the performance of the system in the argument classication task. Using an evaluation benchmark implemented in this research project, the proposed semi-supervised approach has a statistical comparable performance as the one of a supervised classier trained with more annotated data (80,5 vs. 82,3 de \'F IND. 1\', p > 0, 01). (AU)

FAPESP's process: 10/04647-0 - Semi-supervised automatic semantic role labeling for brazilian portuguese
Grantee:Fernando Emilio Alva Manchego
Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master