  In this paper, we introduce a new distributional method for modeling
predicate-argument thematic fit judgments. We use a syntax-based DSM to build a
prototypical representation of verb-specific roles: for every verb, we extract
the most salient second order contexts for each of its roles (i.e. the most
salient dimensions of typical role fillers), and then we compute thematic fit
as a weighted overlap between the top features of candidate fillers and role
prototypes. Our experiments show that our method consistently outperforms a
baseline re-implementing a state-of-the-art system, and achieves better or
comparable results to those reported in the literature for the other
unsupervised systems. Moreover, it provides an explicit representation of the
features characterizing verb-specific semantic roles.
