Thematic Roles Are Not Semantic Roles

Extending Semantic Similarity Measurement with Thematic Roles

Semantic similarity measurement plays a significant role in semantic interoperability and in information retrieval within the geo domain as it supports the detection of conceptually close but not identical entities. In featurebased models, the similarity measurement is done by comparing common and different features such as parts, attributes and functions. This paper suggests adding thematic ro...

Thematic Roles and Semantic Space Insights from Distributional Semantic Models

The goal of this work is to use Distributional Semantic Models (Sahlgren, 2006; Turney, 2010) to get insights into the nature of thematic roles. In particular, we investigate whether the semantic representation produced by Distributional Semantic Models (henceforth, DSMs) is sensitive to effects of typicality involving thematic roles, and we quantify their relative prominence in the semantic re...

Thematic Roles and Language Comprehension1

Thematic Roles and Syntactic Structure*

One central task for any theory of grammar is to solve the so-called “linking problem”: the problem of discovering regularities in how the participants of an event are expressed in surface grammatical forms and explaining those regularities. Suppose that one adopts a broadly Chomskyan perspective, in which there is a distinction between the language faculty and other cognitive faculties, includ...

Thematic Roles – Universal , Particular , and Idiosyncratic Aspects

Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their...