# Syntactic Scaffolds for Semantic Structures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10485 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10485/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Transformer Grammars: Augmenting Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Inductive Biases at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00633/) (2022)
- [Structural Guidance for Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00104/) (2021)
- [On Generalization in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09667/) (2021)
- [Control Prefixes for Parameter-Efficient Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08329/) (2021)
- [LOME: Large Ontology Multilingual Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12175/) (2021)
- [Attention Can Reflect Syntactic Structure (If You Let It)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10927/) (2021)
- [Semantic Role Labeling as Dependency Parsing: Exploring Latent Tree Structures Inside Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06865/) (2021)
- [Linguistic Frameworks Go Toe-to-Toe at Neuro-Symbolic Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07874/) (2021)
- [A Double-Graph Based Framework for Frame Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09158/) (2022)
- [What's in your Head? Emergent Behaviour in Multi-Task Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06129/) (2021)
- [A Graph-Based Neural Model for End-to-End Frame Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12319/) (2021)
- [Improved Latent Tree Induction with Distant Supervision via Span Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05112/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generalize Compositionally by Transferring Across Semantic Parsing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05013/) (2021)
- [PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06275/) (2022)
- [Language Modeling with Latent Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10012/) (2022)
- [Joint Universal Syntactic and Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05696/) (2021)
- [Strengthening Structural Inductive Biases by Pre-training to Perform Syntactic Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04543/) (2024)
- [Does Entity Abstraction Help Generative Transformers Reason?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01787/) (2022)
- [A Structured Span Selector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03977/) (2022)
- [Sister Help: Data Augmentation for Frame-Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07725/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained prediction of food insecurity using news streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15602/) (2021)
- [Cited Text Spans for Citation Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06365/) (2023)
- [Improving Span Representation for Domain-adapted Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09811/) (2021)
- [Review of coreference resolution in English and Persian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04428/) (2022)
- [EventNet-ITA: Italian Frame Parsing for Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10892/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Sequence-to-Sequence Constituent Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13373/) (2026)
- [Task Decomposition for Efficient Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24734/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the syntactic scaffold, an approach to incorporating syntactic information into semantic tasks. Syntactic scaffolds avoid expensive syntactic processing at runtime, only making use of a treebank during training, through a multitask objective. We improve over strong baselines on PropBank semantics, frame semantics, and coreference resolution, achieving competitive performance on all three tasks.