FrameNet

FrameNet is a group of online lexical databases based upon the theory of meaning known as Frame semantics, developed by linguist Charles J. Fillmore. The project's fundamental notion is simple: most words' meanings may be best understood in terms of a semantic frame, which is a description of a certain kind of event, connection, or item and its actors.

As an illustration, the act of cooking usually requires the following: a cook, the food being cooked, a container to hold the food while it is being cooked, and a heating instrument. Within FrameNet, this act is represented by a frame named , and its components (, , , and ), are referred to as frame elements (FEs). The frame also lists a number of words that represent it, known as lexical units (LUs), like fry, bake, boil, and broil.

Other frames are simpler. For example, only has an agent or cause, a theme—something that is placed—and the location where it is placed. Some frames are more complex, like , which contains more FEs (offender, injury, injured party, avenger, and punishment). As in the examples of and below, FrameNet's role is to define the frames and annotate sentences to demonstrate how the FEs fit syntactically around the word that elicits the frame. For example:

The only core FE of the frame is called ; non-core FEs , , , etc.

FrameNet includes shallow data on syntactic roles that frame elements play in the example sentences. For example, for a sentence like "She was born about AD 460", FrameNet would mark She as a noun phrase referring to the frame element, and "about AD 460" as a noun phrase corresponding to the frame element. Details of how frame elements can be realized in a sentence are important because this reveals important information about the subcategorization frames as well as possible diathesis alternations (e.g. "John broke the window" vs. "The window broke") of a verb.

Lexical units

Lexical units (LUs) are lemmas, with their part of speech, that evoke a specific frame. In other words, when an LU is identified in a sentence, that specific LU can be associated with its specific frame(s). For each frame, there may be many LUs associated to that frame, and also there may be many frames that share a specific LU; this is typically the case with LUs that have multiple word senses.

Example sentences

Frames are associated with example sentences and frame elements are marked within the sentences. Thus, the sentence

:She was born about AD 460

is associated with the frame , while She is marked as the frame element and "about AD 460" is marked as .

From the start, the FrameNet project has been committed to looking at evidence from actual language use as found in text collections like the British National Corpus. Based on such example sentences, automatic semantic role labeling tools are able to determine frames and mark frame elements in new sentences.

Valences

FrameNet also exposes statistics on the valence of each frame; that is, the number and position of the frame elements within example sentences. The sentence

:She was born about AD 460

falls in the valence pattern

:NP Ext, INI --, NP Dep

which occurs twice in the FrameNet's annotation report for the lexical unit, Semantic Role Labeling has since become one of the standard tasks in natural language processing, with the latest version (1.7) of FrameNet now fully supported in the Natural Language Toolkit.

Since frames are essentially semantic descriptions, they are similar across languages, and several projects have arisen over the years that have relied on the original FrameNet as the basis for additional non-English FrameNets, for Spanish, Japanese, German, and Polish, among others.

Lexical units

Example sentences

Valences

See also

References

Further reading

External links