Semantic Role Labeling for Open Information Extraction

Open Information Extraction is a recent paradigm for machine reading from arbitrary text. In contrast to existing techniques, which have used only shallow syntactic features, we investigate the use of semantic features (semantic roles) for the task of Open IE. We compare TEXTRUNNER (Banko et al., 2007), a state of the art open extractor, with our novel extractor SRL-IE, which is based on UIUC’s SRL system (Punyakanok et al., 2008). We find that SRL-IE is robust to noisy heterogeneous Web data and outperforms TEXTRUNNER on extraction quality. On the other hand, TEXTRUNNER performs over 2 orders of magnitude faster and achieves good precision in high locality and high redundancy extractions. These observations enable the construction of hybrid extractors that output higher quality results than TEXTRUNNER and similar quality as SRL-IE in much less time.