Semantic Role Labeling for multi-VP clauses in Chinese

We have built a semantic role labeling (SRL) system for Chinese clauses, with some desired information of the main-predicate in each clause and the relevant functional slots. The ability of our SRL system dealing with simple clauses is considered as the basic performance of the system. When processing more complex clauses (namely clauses with more than one verb phrase in our definition of complex clauses), it is difficult to identify the main-predicate and the larger functional chunks. The final accuracy of semantic role labeling decreases badly due to the difficulty. We propose in this paper a novel way to replace the auto chunker for clauses with more than one verb phrase (multi-VP). The multi-VP clauses will be transformed to I-VP forms which could be handled easily by our SRL system. It will be proven that the multi-VP clauses can be labeled in an almost same accuracy as the basic accuracy for I-VP clauses after being transformed. Besides being applied in semantic role labeling, the pattern-transformation method has a further perspective on the fields where the syntactic clause-pattern description will help and resources with full syntactic parsing are not available.