Semantic proto-role labeling (SPRL) is an alternative to semantic role labeling (SRL) that moves beyond a categorical definition of roles, following Dowty's feature-based view of proto-roles. This theory determines agenthood vs. patienthood based on a participant's instantiation of more or less typical agent vs. patient properties, such as, e.g. volitionality in an event. To perform SPRL, we develop an ensemble of hierarchical models with self-attention and concurrently learned predicate-argument markers. Our method is competitive with the state-of-the art, overall outperforming previous work in two different formulations of the task (multi-label and Likert scale prediction). In contrast to previous work, our results do not depend on supplementary gold syntax.
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