Semantic Frame Induction using Masked Word Embeddings and Two-Step Clustering

ACL 2021 · Kosuke Yamada, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda ·

Recent studies on semantic frame induction show that relatively high performance has been achieved by using clustering-based methods with contextualized word embeddings. However, there are two potential drawbacks to these methods: one is that they focus too much on the superficial information of the frame-evoking verb and the other is that they tend to divide the instances of the same verb into too many different frame clusters. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a semantic frame induction method using masked word embeddings and two-step clustering. Through experiments on the English FrameNet data, we demonstrate that using the masked word embeddings is effective for avoiding too much reliance on the surface information of frame-evoking verbs and that two-step clustering can improve the number of resulting frame clusters for the instances of the same verb.