Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

FrameNet, current collaborations and future goals

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Language Resources and Evaluation Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper will focus on recent and near-term future developments at FrameNet (FN) and the interoperability issues they raise. We begin by discussing the current state of the Berkeley FN database including major changes in the data format for the latest data release. We then briefly review two recent local projects, "Rapid Vanguarding”, which has created a new interface for the frame and lexical unit definition process based on the Word Sketch Engine of Kilgarriff et al. (2004), and “Beyond the Core”, which has developed tools for annotating constructions, and created a sample “construction” of especially “interesting” constructions which are neither simply lexical nor easy for the standard parsers to parse. We also cover two current collaborations, FN’s part in the development of the manually annotated subcorpus of the American National Corpus, and a pilot study on aligning WordNet and FrameNet, to exploit the complementary strengths of these quite different resources. We discuss FN-related research on Spanish, Japanese, German (SALSA), Chinese and other languages, and the language-independence of frames, along with interesting FN-related work by others, and a sketch of a large group of image-schematic frames which are now being added to FN. We close with some ideas about how FrameNet can be opened up, to allow broader participation in the development process without losing precision and coherence, including a small-scale study on acquiring data for FN using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. FrameNet also records instances in which so-called “core” frame elements do not appear even though conceptually necessary. This is called “null instantiation” and is further divided into cases in which the omission is licensed by a grammatical construction in which the FEE participates (“constructional null instantiation” such as omission of subjects of imperatives), those where the referent is recoverable from the context (“definite null instantiation”, e.g. We won!) and those in which it is not (“indefinite null instantiation”, e.g, I already ate)

  2. Although 10,077 FEs sounds like an enormous number, only about a third are “core” FEs, meaning that they are an essential part of the definition of the frame and can also appear in nuclear syntactic positions; the remainder are “non-core” FEs, expressing notions such as time, place, and beneficiary, which are common across many frames.

  3. In fact, the basic criterion for deciding whether to annotate an NP after a verb as object or dependent is whether or not it could appear as the subject of a passive; thus in He resembles his father, one marks his father as dependent, rather than object.

  4. The frame-frame relations in the hierarchy are not limited to inheritance relations; frame relations such as Causative_of and Inchoative_of are also accompanied by at least some FE–FE relations, which can also be used to connect them with the higher level frames.

  5. Some of these high-level FEs can also be compared to the Arg0, Arg1, and some of the ArgM labels used in the PropBank project, as discussed in Palmer et al. (2005, 88–89)

  6. The classic linguistic discussion of semantic features for animal names is relevant here: fledgling is a common filler of this slot for all birds, while other animals have species-specific terms for the young (calf, foal, kid, etc. which incorporate this FE. There are so many terms for this feature in human beings that FN has created a frame People_by_age.

  7. Since these blocks of sentences were neither actual texts with paragraph structure nor sentences which we selected from our local corpora, we had to devise a new import process for them; we created dummy "documents”, treating the sentences for each lemma as a “document” and splitting up “paragraphs” of 10 sentences each within them.

  8. Japanese FN has elected to handle this issue by inserting spaces between tokens (so that the FN annotation software will function as expected), but hiding them in the display (so that the text of the sentences looks normal).

References

  • Baumgartner, P., & Burchardt, A. (2004). Logic programming infrastructure for inferences on FrameNet. In Logics in artificial intelligence, volume 3229 of lecture notes in computer science (pp. 591–603). Springer. doi:CategoryApplications. http://www.springerlink.com/content/hm38t53qv65yjcq3/.

  • Boas, H. C. (Ed.). (2009). Multilingual FrameNets in computational lexicography: Methods and applications. Mouton de Gruyter doi:10.1515/9783110212976.

  • Borin, L., Dannélls, D., Forsberg, M., Toporowska Gronostaj, M., & Kokkinakis, D. (2010). The past meets the present in the Swedish FrameNet++. https://svn.spraakdata.gu.se/sb/fnplusplus/pub/SweFN_Euralex_extended.pdf. Extended version of EURALEX 2010 presentation. Accessed August 25, 2010.

  • Burchardt, A., Pennachiotti, M., Thater, S., & Pinkal, M. (2009). Assessing the impact of frame semantics on textual entailment. Natural Language Engineering, 15(Special Issue 04), 527–550. doi:10.1017/S1351324909990131. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6171000&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1351324909990131.

  • Callison-Burch, C., & Dredze, M. (Eds.). (2010). Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 workshop on creating speech and language data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Los Angeles, June 2010. Association for Computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W10/W10-07.

  • Chamberlain, J., Poesio, M., & Kruschwitz, U. (2008). Phrase detectives: A web-based collaborative annotation game. In Proceedings of iSemantics. http://www.anawiki.org/phrasedetectives_isem08.pdf.

  • Chen, B., & Fung, P. (2004). Automatic construction of an English-Chinese bilingual FrameNet. In HLT/NAACL: Proceedings. Boston. http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/proceeds/2004/compling/hlt-naacl2004/shorts/pdf/211_Paper.pdf.

  • Das, D., Schneider, N., Chen, D., & Smith, N. A. (2010). Probabilistic frame-semantic parsing. In Proceedings of the North American chapter of the association for computational Linguistics human language technologies conference. Los Angeles, June 2010. http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N10/N10-1138.pdf.

  • de Melo, G., Baker, C. F., Ide, N., Passonneau, R. J., & Fellbaum, C. (2012). Empirical comparisons of MASC word sense annotations. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. U. Doğan, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC’12). Istanbul: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

  • Ellsworth, M., Ohara, K., Subirats, C., & Schmidt, T. (2006). Frame-semantic analysis of motion scenarios in English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. In Fourth international conference on construction grammar. Tokyo. http://jfn.st.hc.keio.ac.jp/publications/HoundICCG4.pdf.

  • Erk, K., Kowalski, A., & Padó, S. (2003). The SALSA annotation tool. In Proceedings of the workshop on prospects and advances in the syntax/semantics interface. France: Nancy.

  • Erk, K., & Padó, S. (2006). Shalmaneser—a flexible toolbox for semantic role assignment. In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC-2006). Italy: Genoa.

  • Fellbaum, C., & Baker, C. F. (2008). Can WordNet and FrameNet be made “interoperable”?. In F. Webster et al. (pp. 67–74). http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/2008/html/resources/~proceeding_conference.pdf.

  • Ferrández, Ó., Ellsworth, M., Muñoz, R., & Baker, C. F. (2010). Aligning FrameNet and WordNet based on semantic neighborhoods. In N. Calzolari (Conference Chair), K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odjik, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on international language resources and evaluation (LREC’10) (pp. 310–314). Valletta, Malta, may 2010. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). ISBN 2-9517408-6-7. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/636_Paper.pdf.

  • Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The case for case. In E. Bach & R. Harms (Eds.), Universals in linguistic theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fillmore, C. J. (1982) Frame semantics. In Linguistics in the morning calm (pp. 111–137). Seoul, South Korea: Hanshin Publishing Co.

  • Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. (1988). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language, 64(1), 501–538.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gangemi, A., Guarina, N., Masolo, C., & Oltramari, A. (2010). Interfacing WordNet with DOLCE: Towards onto WordNet. In H. Chu-Ren , N. Calzolari, A. Gangemi, A. Lenci, A. Oltramari, & L. Prévot (Eds.), Ontology and the lexicon: A natural language processing perspective, Studies in NLP (pp. 36–52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hasegawa, Y., Lee-Goldman, R., Hirose Ohara, K., Fujii, S., & Fillmore, C. J. (2010). On expressing measurement and comparison in English and Japanese. In C. B. Hans (Ed.), Contrastive construction grammar (pp. 169–200). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirose Ohara, K., Fujii, S., Ohori, T., Suzuki, R., Saito, H., & Ishizaki, S. (2006). Frame-based contrastive lexical semantics and japanese framenet: The case of risk and kakeru. In Fourth international conference on construction grammar. Tokyo. http://jfn.st.hc.keio.ac.jp/publications/JFN.pdf.

  • Hong, J., & Baker, C. F. (2011). How good is the crowd at “real” wsd? In Proceedings of the 5th linguistic annotation workshop (pp. 30–37). Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2011. Association for computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-0404.

  • Ide, N., Baker, C., Fellbaum, C., & Passonneau, R. (2010). The manually annotated sub-corpus: A community resource for and by the people. In Proceedings of the ACL 2010 conference short papers (pp. 68–73). Uppsala, Sweden, July 2010. Association for computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P10-2013.

  • Ide, N., Reppen, R., & Suderman, K. (2002). The American national corpus: More than the web can provide. In Proceedings of the third language resources and evaluation conference (LREC) (pp. 839–844). Canary Islands, Spain: Las Palmas. http://americannationalcorpus.org/pubs.html.

  • Johansson, R., & Nugues, P. (2006). A FrameNet-based semantic role labeler for Swedish. In Proceedings of coling/ACL 2006. Sydney, Australia, July 17-21 2006.

  • Johansson, R., Nugues, P. (2007). LTH: Semantic structure extraction using non projective dependency trees. In Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on semantic evaluations (SemEval-2007) (pp. 227–230). Prague, Czech Republic, June 2007. Association for computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W07/W07-2048.

  • Kay, P., & Fillmore, C. J. (1999). Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The what’s x doing y? Construction. Language, 75, 1–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kilgarriff, A., Rychly, P., Smrz, P., & Tugwell, D. (2004). The sketch engine. In Proceedings of EURALEX 2004. France: Lorient, July 2004.

  • Li, R., Liu, H., & Li, S. (2010). Chinese frame identification using t-crf model. In Coling 2010: Posters (pp. 674–682). Beijing, China, August 2010. COLING 2010 Organizing Committee. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C10-2077.

  • Lönneker-Rodman, B., & Baker, C. F. (2009). The FrameNet model and its applications. Natural Language Engineering, 15(03), 415–453. doi: 10.1017/S1351324909005117. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=5654476&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1351324909005117.

  • Lönneker-Rodman, B., Baker, C., & Hong, J. (2008). The new FrameNet desktop: A usage scenario for Slovenian. In F. Webster et al. (pp. 147–154). http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/2008/html/resources/proceeding_conference.pdf.

  • Ovchinnikova, E., Vieu, L., Oltramari, A., Borgo, S., & Alexandrov, T. (2010). Data-driven and ontological analysis of FrameNet for natural language reasoning. In N. Calzolari (Conference Chair), K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odjik, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the seventh conference on international language resources and evaluation (LREC’10). Valletta, Malta, may 2010. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). ISBN 2-9517408-6-7. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/84_Paper.pdf.

  • Padó S. (2007). Cross-Lingual annotation projection models for role-semantic information. PhD thesis, Saarland University. Published as Volume 21, Saarbrücken dissertations in computational Linguistics and language technology. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Saarland University. ISBN 978-3-933218-20-9.

  • Palmer, M., Gildea, D., & Kingsbury, P. (2005). The proposition bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 31(1), 71–106, March 2005. http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J05/J05-1004.pdf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Passonneau, R. J., Baker, C. F., Fellbaum, C., & Ide, N. (2012). The MASC word sense corpus. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. U. Doğan, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC’12). Istanbul: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

  • Petruck, M. (2009). Typological considerations in constructing a Hebrew FrameNet. In H. C. Boas (Ed.), Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography (pp. 183–205). Mouton.

  • Power, R., & Williams, S. (2012). Generating numerical approximations. Computational Linguistics, 38, 1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scheffczyk, J., Baker, C. F., & Narayanan, S. (2006). Reasoning over natural language text by means of FrameNet and ontologies. In H. Chu-Ren , N. Calzolari, A. Gangemi, A. Lenci, A. Oltramari, & L. Prévot (Eds.), Ontology and the Lexicon: A natural language processing perspective, studies in natural language processing, chapter 4. (pp. 53–71). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Expanded version of paper at OntoLex, 2006. (ISBN-13: 9780521886598).

  • Shen, D., & Lapata, M. (2007). Using semantic roles to improve question answering. In Proceedings of the 2007 joint conference on empirical methods in natural language processing and computational natural language learning (EMNLP-CoNLL) (pp. 12–21). http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D/D07/D07-1002.

  • Snow, R., O’Connor, B., Jurafsky, D., & Ng, A. (2008). Cheap and fast—but is it good? Evaluating non-expert annotations for natural language tasks. In Proceedings of the 2008 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 254–263). Hawaii: Honolulu, October 2008. Association for Computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D08-1027.

  • Tonelli, S., & Pighin, D. (2009). New features for FrameNet–WordNet mapping. In Proceedings of the thirteenth conference on computational natural language learning (CoNLL-2009) (pp. 219–227). Colorado: Boulder, June 2009. Association for Computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W09-1127.

  • Webster, J,, Ide, N., & Chengyu Fang, A. (Eds.). (2008). Proceedings of the first international conference on global interoperability for language resources. Hong Kong: City University. http://icgl.ctl.cityu.edu.hk/2008/html/resources/proceeding_conference.pdf.

Download references

Acknowledgments

In addition to grant noted above, we are indebted above all to the National Science Foundation for a series of grants that have supported FrameNet: first under grant IRI #9618838, March 1997 - February 2000, “Tools for lexicon-building”; then under grant ITR/HCI #0086132, September 2000 - August 2003, entitled “FrameNet++: An On-Line Lexical Semantic Resource and its Application to Speech and Language Technology”; and a small but much appreciated supplement in 2004. In addition to the basic support for building the FrameNet lexical database, the project has also received some NSF funding in the form of a subcontract from grant IIS-0325646 (Dan Jurafsky, PI) entitled “Domain-Independent Semantic Interpretation” for providing full-text FrameNet-style annotation of texts also annotated in the PropBank project. More recently, we have been fortunate to receive several NSF grants targeted at more specific tasks: our work on Rapid Vanguarding is made possible by #0535297 "IIS: Rapid Development of a Frame Semantic Lexicon”, the preliminary study on aligning WordNet and FrameNet by #0705155 “RI: Collaborative Proposal: Complementary Lexical Resources: Towards an Alignment of WordNet and FrameNet”, and the construction annotation by #0739426 SGER: “Beyond the Core: A Pilot Project on Cataloguing Grammatical Constructions and Multiword Expressions in English”. Our collaboration in the ANC MASC annotation is funded by an ICSI subcontract from an NSF grant to Prof. Nancy Ide at Vassar, #0708952, “CRI: CRD A Richly Annotated Resource for Language Processing and Linguistics Research”. The testing of crowdsourcing was made possible by an NSF EAGER grant (NSF 0947841).

The collaboration with DAC is a subcontract under an Army SBIR Phase II Topic Number A09-093, "Metadata Databases”. The collaboration with Siemens is funded by a grant from Siemens Corporate Research to UC Berkeley “FrameNet for Medical Semantics”.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. FrameNet Project, International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center St., Suite 600, Berkeley, CA, 94704, USA

    Collin F. Baker

Authors
  1. Collin F. Baker
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Collin F. Baker.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Baker, C.F. FrameNet, current collaborations and future goals. Lang Resources & Evaluation 46, 269–286 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9191-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9191-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation