  Multitask learning has been applied successfully to a range of tasks, mostly
morphosyntactic. However, little is known on when MTL works and whether there
are data characteristics that help to determine its success. In this paper we
evaluate a range of semantic sequence labeling tasks in a MTL setup. We examine
different auxiliary tasks, amongst which a novel setup, and correlate their
impact to data-dependent conditions. Our results show that MTL is not always
effective, significant improvements are obtained only for 1 out of 5 tasks.
When successful, auxiliary tasks with compact and more uniform label
distributions are preferable.
