Semi-Supervised Frame-Semantic Parsing for Unknown Predicates

We describe a new approach to disambiguating semantic frames evoked by lexical predicates previously unseen in a lexicon or annotated data. Our approach makes use of large amounts of unlabeled data in a graph-based semi-supervised learning framework. We construct a large graph where vertices correspond to potential predicates and use label propagation to learn possible semantic frames for new ones. The label-propagated graph is used within a frame-semantic parser and, for unknown predicates, results in over 15% absolute improvement in frame identification accuracy and over 13% absolute improvement in full frame-semantic parsing F₁ score on a blind test set, over a state-of-the-art supervised baseline.