Computational linking theory
This work addresses the inverse of Semantic Role Labeling for computational linguistics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theoretical frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of mapping verbs' semantic arguments to syntactic arguments by developing a Computational Linking Theory framework to implement and test linking theories, and introduces a Semantic Proto-Role Linking Model to induce and compare semantic proto-roles with Dowty's theory.
A linking theory explains how verbs' semantic arguments are mapped to their syntactic arguments---the inverse of the Semantic Role Labeling task from the shallow semantic parsing literature. In this paper, we develop the Computational Linking Theory framework as a method for implementing and testing linking theories proposed in the theoretical literature. We deploy this framework to assess two cross-cutting types of linking theory: local v. global models and categorical v. featural models. To further investigate the behavior of these models, we develop a measurement model in the spirit of previous work in semantic role induction: the Semantic Proto-Role Linking Model. We use this model, which implements a generalization of Dowty's seminal Proto-Role Theory, to induce semantic proto-roles, which we compare to those Dowty proposes.