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FrameNet is a research and resource development project based at the
International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...
(ICSI) in
Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...
, which has produced an electronic resource based on a theory of meaning called frame semantics. The data that FrameNet has analyzed show that the sentence "John sold a car to Mary" essentially describes the same basic situation (semantic frame) as "Mary bought a car from John", just from a different perspective. A semantic frame is a conceptual structure describing an event, relation, or object along with its participants. The FrameNet
lexical database In digital lexicography, natural language processing, and digital humanities, a lexical resource is a language resource consisting of data regarding the lexemes of the lexicon of one or more languages e.g., in the form of a database. Character ...
contains over 1,200 semantic ''frames'', 13,000 ''lexical units'' (a pairing of a
word A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
with a meaning;
polysemous Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single ...
words are represented by several ''lexical units'') and 202,000 example sentences.
Charles J. Fillmore Charles J. Fillmore (August 9, 1929 – February 13, 2014) was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore sp ...
, who developed the theory of frame semantics which serves as the theoretical the basis of FrameNet, founded the project in 1997 and continued to lead the effort until he died in 2014. Frame Semantic theory and FrameNet have been influential in linguistics and natural language processing, where it led to the task of automatic
Semantic Role Labeling In natural language processing, semantic role labeling (also called shallow semantic parsing or slot-filling) is the process that assigns labels to words or phrases in a sentence that indicates their semantic role in the sentence, such as that of a ...
.


Concepts


Frames

A frame is a schematic representation of a situation involving various participants, props, and other conceptual roles. Examples of frame names are Being_born and Locative_relation. A frame in FrameNet contains a textual description of what it represents (a frame definition), associated frame elements, lexical units, example sentences, and frame-to-frame relations.


Frame elements

Frame elements (FE) provide additional information to the semantic structure of a sentence. Each frame has a number of core and non-core FEs which can be thought of as semantic roles. Core FEs are essential to the meaning of the frame while non-core FEs are generally descriptive (such as time, place, manner, etc.). Some examples include: * The only core FE of the Being_born frame is called Child; non-core FEs being Time, Place, Relatives, etc. * Core FEs of the Commerce_goods-transfer include the Seller, Buyer, Goods, among other things, while non-core FEs include a Place, Purpose, 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 In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
referring to the Child FE, and "about AD 460" as a
noun phrase In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
corresponding to the Time frame element. Details of how frame elements can be realized in a sentence are important because this reveals important information about the
subcategorization frame In linguistics, subcategorization denotes the ability/necessity for lexical items (usually verbs) to require/allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur. The notion of subcategorization is similar to the noti ...
s as well as possible
diathesis alternation In linguistics, diathesis alternation or verb alternationLevin, B. (1993) English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL occurs when the same verb can be used in different subcategori ...
s (e.g. "John broke the window" vs. "The window broke") of a verb.


Lexical units

Lexical units (LU) 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. Alongside the frame, each lexical unit is associated with specific frame elements by means of the annotated example sentences. Example: Lexical units that evoke the Complaining frame (or more specific perspectivized versions of it, to be precise), include the verbs "complain", "grouse", "lament", and others.


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 Being_born, while "She" is marked as the frame element Child and "about AD 460" is marked as Time. (See th
FrameNet Annotation Report
for born.v.) 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 The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention ...
. Based on such example sentences, automatic
semantic role labeling In natural language processing, semantic role labeling (also called shallow semantic parsing or slot-filling) is the process that assigns labels to words or phrases in a sentence that indicates their semantic role in the sentence, such as that of a ...
tools are able to determine frames and mark frame elements in new sentences.


Valences

FrameNet also exposes the statistics on the ''valences'' of the ''frames'', that is the number and the 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 two times in th
example sentences
in FrameNet, namely in: :She'' was born ''about AD 460'', daughter and granddaughter of Roman and Byzantine emperors, whose family had been prominent in Roman politics for over 700 years.'' :''He was soon posted to north Africa, and never met their only child, ''a daughter'' born ''8 June 1941''.''


Frame relations

FrameNet additionally captures relationships between different frames using relations. These include the following: * Inheritance: When one frame is a more specific version of another, more abstract parent frame. Anything that is true about the parent frame must also be true about the child frame, and a mapping is specified between the frame elements of the parent and the frame elements of the child. * Perspectivized_in: A neutral frame (like Commerce_transfer-goods) is connected to a frame with a specific perspective of the same scenario (e.g. the Commerce_sell frame, which assumes the perspective of the seller or the Commerce_buy frame, which assumes the perspective of the buyer) * Subframe: Some frames like the Criminal_process frame refer to complex scenarios that consist of several individual states or events that can be described by separate frames like Arrest, Trial, and so on. * Precedes: The Precedes relation captures a temporal order that holds between subframes of a complex scenario. * Causative_of and Inchoative_of: There is a fairly systematic relationship between stative descriptions (like Position_on_a_scale frame, e.g. "She had a high salary") and causative descriptions (like Cause_change_of_scalar_position frame, e.g. "She raised his salary") or inchoative descriptions (like Change_position_on_a_scale frame, e.g. "Her salary increased"). * Using: A relationship that holds between a frame that in some way involves another frame. For instance, the Judgment_communication frame uses both the Judgment frame and the Statement frame, but does not inherit from either of them because there is no clear correspondence of the frame elements. * See_also: Connects frames that bear some resemblance but need to be distinguished carefully.


Applications

FrameNet has proven to be useful in a number of computational applications, because computers need additional knowledge in order to recognize that "John sold a car to Mary" and "Mary bought a car from John" describe essentially the same situation, despite using two quite different verbs, different prepositions and a different word order. FrameNet has been used in applications like
question answering Question answering (QA) is a computer science discipline within the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP), which is concerned with building systems that automatically answer questions posed by humans in a natural l ...
,
paraphrasing A paraphrase () is a restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words. The term itself is derived via Latin ', . The act of paraphrasing is also called ''paraphrasis''. History Although paraphrases likely abounded in oral tra ...
, recognizing
textual entailment Textual entailment (TE) in natural language processing is a directional relation between text fragments. The relation holds whenever the truth of one text fragment follows from another text. In the TE framework, the entailing and entailed texts are ...
, and
information extraction Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...
, either directly or by means of
Semantic Role Labeling In natural language processing, semantic role labeling (also called shallow semantic parsing or slot-filling) is the process that assigns labels to words or phrases in a sentence that indicates their semantic role in the sentence, such as that of a ...
tools. The first automatic system for
Semantic Role Labeling In natural language processing, semantic role labeling (also called shallow semantic parsing or slot-filling) is the process that assigns labels to words or phrases in a sentence that indicates their semantic role in the sentence, such as that of a ...
(SRL, sometimes also referred to as "shallow semantic parsing") was developed by Daniel Gildea and
Daniel Jurafsky Daniel Jurafsky is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University, and also an author. With Daniel Gildea, he is known for developing the first automatic system for semantic role labeling (SRL). He is the author of ''The ...
based on FrameNet in 2002. 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 The Natural Language Toolkit, or more commonly NLTK, is a suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) for English written in the Python programming language. It was developed by Steven Bird and E ...
. 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.


See also

*
BabelNet BabelNet is a multilingual lexicalized semantic network and ontology developed at the NLP group of the Sapienza University of Rome.R. Navigli and S. P Ponzetto. 2012BabelNet: The Automatic Construction, Evaluation and Application of a Wide-Cover ...
: a multilingual semantic network integrating FrameNet *
PropBank PropBank is a corpus that is annotated with verbal propositions and their arguments—a "proposition bank". Although "PropBank" refers to a specific corpus produced by Martha Palmer ''et al.'', the term ''propbank'' is also coming to be used as ...
* Null instantiation *
Frame language Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing " stereotyped situations". They were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge". Frames are ...
*
UBY UBY is a large-scale lexical-semantic resource for natural language processing (NLP) developed at the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP) in the department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt . UBY is based on th ...
: a database of 10 resources including FrameNet


References


Further reading

*


External links


FrameNet home pageChinese FrameNetDanish FrameNetGerman FrameNetJapanese FrameNetKorean FrameNetPortuguese FrameNet (Brazil)Spanish FrameNetSwedish FrameNet
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