Transformer-based Swedish Semantic Role Labeling through Transfer Learning

Abstract

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is a task in natural language understanding where the goal is to extract semantic roles for a given sentence. English SRL has achieved state-of-the-art performance using Transformer techniques and supervised learning. However, this technique is not a viable choice for smaller languages like Swedish due to the limited amount of training data. In this paper, we present the first effort in building a Transformer-based SRL system for Swedish by exploring multilingual and cross-lingual transfer learning methods and leveraging the Swedish FrameNet resource. We demonstrate that multilingual transfer learning outperforms two different cross-lingual transfer models. We also found some differences between frames in FrameNet that can either hinder or enhance the model’s performance. The resulting end-to-end model is freely available and will be made accessible through Språkbanken Text’s research infrastructure.