Improving Semantic Role Classification with Selectional Preferences

This work incorporates Selectional Preferences (SP) into a Semantic Role (SR) Classification system. We learn separate selectional preferences for noun phrases and prepositional phrases and we integrate them in a state-of-the-art SR classification system both in the form of features and individual class predictors. We show that the inclusion of the refined SPs yields statistically significant improvements on both in domain and out of domain data (14.07% and 11.67% error reduction, respectively). The key factor for success is the combination of several SP methods with the original classification model using metaclassification.