PriMeSRL-Eval: A Practical Quality Metric for Semantic Role Labeling Systems Evaluation

Semantic role labeling (SRL) identifies predicate-argument structures in a sentence. This task is usually accomplished in four steps: predicate identification, predicate sense disambiguation, argument identification, and argument classification. Errors introduced at one step propagate to later steps. Unfortunately, the existing SRL evaluation scripts do not consider the full effect of this error propagation aspect. They either evaluate arguments independent of predicate sense (CoNLL09) or do not evaluate predicate sense at all (CoNLL05), yielding an inaccurate SRL model performance on the argument classification task. In this paper, we address key practical issues with existing evaluation scripts and propose a more strict SRL evaluation metric, PriMeSRL. We observe that by employing PriMeSRL, the quality evaluation of all SoTA SRL models drops significantly, and their relative rankings also change. We also show that PriMeSRL successfully penalizes actual failures in SoTA SRL models.