Computational linking 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 crosscutting 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.