Modeling Semantic Distance in the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs

We explore human judgments on how well individual patterns of 29 target verbs from the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs describe their random KWICs. We focus on cases where more than one pattern is judged as highly appropriate for a given KWIC and seek to estimate the effect of event participants (arguments) being denotatively similar in two patterns, considering all pair combinations in a given lemma. We compare this effect to the effect of several contextual features of the KWICs, the effect of paired PDEV implicatures implying each other, and the effect of belonging to a given lemma. We show that the lemma effect is still stronger than any feature going across lemmas we have examined so far, so that each verb appears to be a little universe in its own right.