Crosslingual Induction of Semantic Roles

We argue that multilingual parallel data provides a valuable source of indirect supervision for induction of shallow semantic representations. Specifically, we consider unsupervised induction of semantic roles from sentences annotated with automatically-predicted syntactic dependency representations and use a stateof-the-art generative Bayesian non-parametric model. At inference time, instead of only seeking the model which explains the monolingual data available for each language, we regularize the objective by introducing a soft constraint penalizing for disagreement in argument labeling on aligned sentences. We propose a simple approximate learning algorithm for our set-up which results in efficient inference. When applied to German-English parallel data, our method obtains a substantial improvement over a model trained without using the agreement signal, when both are tested on non-parallel sentences.