  This paper introduces and analyzes a battery of inference models for the
problem of semantic role labeling: one based on constraint satisfaction, and
several strategies that model the inference as a meta-learning problem using
discriminative classifiers. These classifiers are developed with a rich set of
novel features that encode proposition and sentence-level information. To our
knowledge, this is the first work that: (a) performs a thorough analysis of
learning-based inference models for semantic role labeling, and (b) compares
several inference strategies in this context. We evaluate the proposed
inference strategies in the framework of the CoNLL-2005 shared task using only
automatically-generated syntactic information. The extensive experimental
evaluation and analysis indicates that all the proposed inference strategies
are successful -they all outperform the current best results reported in the
CoNLL-2005 evaluation exercise- but each of the proposed approaches has its
advantages and disadvantages. Several important traits of a state-of-the-art
SRL combination strategy emerge from this analysis: (i) individual models
should be combined at the granularity of candidate arguments rather than at the
granularity of complete solutions; (ii) the best combination strategy uses an
inference model based in learning; and (iii) the learning-based inference
benefits from max-margin classifiers and global feedback.
