Applying sentence simplification to the CoNLL-2008 shared task

Abstract

Our submission to the CoNLL-2008 shared task (Surdeanu et al., 2008) focused on applying a novel method for semantic role labeling to the shared task. Our system first simplifies each sentence to be labeled using a set of hand-constructed rules; the weights of the system are trained on semantic role labeling data to generate simplifications which are as useful as possible for semantic role labeling. Our system is only a semantic role labeling system, and thus did not receive a score for Syntactic Dependencies (or, by extension, a score for the complete problem). Unlike most systems in the shared task, our system took constituency parses as input. On the sub-task of semantic dependencies, our system obtained an F1 score of 76.17, the highest in the open task. In this paper we give a high-level overview of the sentence simplification system, and discuss and analyze the modifications to this system required for the CoNLL-2008 shared task.