Semantic role theory considers roles as a small universal set of unanalyzed entities. It means that formally there are no restrictions on role combinations. We argue that the semantic roles co-occur in verb representations. It means that there are hidden restrictions on role combinations. To demonstrate that a practical and evidence-based approach has been built on in-depth analysis of the largest verb database VerbNet. The consequences of this approach are considered.
@cite_14: The FrameNet Project is producing a lexicon of English for both human use and NLP applications, based on the principles of Frame Semantics, in which sentences are described on the basis of predicators which evoke semantic frames and other constituents which express the participants (frame elements) in these frames. Our lexicon contains detailed information about the possible syntactic realizations of frame elements, derived from annotated corpus examples. In the process, we have developed a suite of tools for the definition of semantic frames, for annotating sentences, for searching the results, and for creating a variety ofreports. We will discuss the conceptual basis ofour work and demonstrate the tools we work with, the results we produce, and how they may be of use to other NLP projects.
The question about internal organization inside of the list of roles can be rephrased in a more general form: are there any types of relations across roles? Many linguists pointed out that roles are related in some way. They paid attention to the fact that some semantic roles co-occur while the others do not. For example, the role frame Agent, Patient, Instrument represents lots of verbs but the role frames Patient, Experiencer or Beneficiary, Goal do not represent any verb at all. In FrameNet @cite_14 there are 2 types of role-to-role relations -- "requires" and "excludes" -- that indicate for a specific role in a frame which roles are required and which are excluded.