Welcome to the club: Designing the inventory of semantic roles for adjectives

Компьютерная лингвистика и интеллектуальные технологии. 2016. No. 15. P. 440–454.

Lyashevskaya O., Kashkin E.

The argument constructions of adjectives has largely been out of the scope of research on semantic roles both in theoretical and IT fields. Before adding the roles of adjectival arguments to the network of semantic roles it is important to determine whether the adjectival roles form a separate list or whether they can be seen as an extension of roles assigned to the patterns of verbs and nominalizations. We discuss the general principles of how the inventory of adjectival roles should be organized in comparison with the existing inventories of verbal roles. In order to verify our statements, we carry out an experimental survey aimed at measuring the similarity between adjectival and verbal roles. The results have shown that both semantic interpretation of roles and their typical morpho-syntactic expression are significant for the evaluation and should be taken into account in working out the inventory. Besides, the specificity of adjectives lies in their prototypical stative semantics, which favors some differences in assigning a semantic role as compared to verbs. The results of the survey also provide some evidence for verification and development the inventory of verbal semantic roles.

Keywords: русский язык, глагол, Russian language, модель управления, имя прилагательное, Verbs, экспериментальная лингвистика, Experimental Linguistics, adjectives, семантические роли, семантическая близость, semantic similarity of words, semantic roles, predicate-argument constructions, valency pattern, предикатно-аргументные конструкции, согласие асессоров