Semantic role labeling

In natural language processing, semantic role labeling (also called shallow semantic parsing or slot-filling) is the process that assigns labels to words or phrases in a sentence that indicates their semantic role in the sentence, such as that of an agent, goal, or result.

It serves to find the meaning of the sentence. To do this, it detects the arguments associated with the predicate or verb of a sentence and how they are classified into their specific roles. A common example is the sentence "Mary sold the book to John." The agent is "Mary," the predicate is "sold" (or rather, "to sell,") the theme is "the book," and the recipient is "John." Another example is how "the book belongs to me" would need two labels such as "possessed" and "possessor" and "the book was sold to John" would need two other labels such as theme and recipient, despite these two clauses being similar to "subject" and "object" functions.^[1]