Semantic Role Labeling

Historical notes

1. How did Fillmore’s case grammar arise?
   Studying Tesnière’s dependency grammar, Fillmore called argument roles actants, then cases, proposing a universal list (Agent, Patient, Instrument…); verbs were listed with their case frames.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 22, Historical notes, p. 516
2. What is frame semantics?
   Fillmore’s idea that words are understood against packages of connected expectations about situation types (frames, schemas, scenarios, scripts), presupposed as background.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 22, Historical notes, p. 516
3. How did the FrameNet and PropBank corpora change SRL research?
   Their consistent large annotations recast SRL from 1970s handwritten rules into supervised machine learning (Gildea & Jurafsky 2000 on FrameNet, then PropBank), later with dependency features and neural models (biLSTMs, then transformers).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 22, Historical notes, p. 517
4. What is implicit argument detection (iSRL)?
   Finding arguments that appear only in another sentence or must be inferred: in “This house has a new owner. The sale was finalized 10 days ago.”, the Arg1 of sale is the house.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 22, Historical notes, p. 517
5. What are connotation frames?
   Frames marking richer information about predicate arguments, such as the writer’s or reader’s sentiment toward them: “he survived a bombing” expresses sympathy for he and negative sentiment toward the bombing.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 22, Historical notes, p. 517