Event

The FrameNet Lexicon and Constructicon: Implications for Speech and Machine Translation

Charles Fillmore and Collin Baker

ICSI

Tuesday, April 07, 2009
12:30

The FrameNet project has grown out of the theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, developed by Charles Fillmore and colleagues over the last three decades. Since 1997, we have been building a lexicon of English with uniquely detailed information about how predicates combine with their dependents to express events, relations and entities, documented with hand-annotated examples. Such frames range from simple events such as Self-motion to complexes such as Criminal_process. Since 2004, we have been annotating full texts showing how this process works in practice, and for the last two years, we have also been compiling a "constructicon" of grammatical constructions, also documented with annotated examples. Others are building similar lexica for other languages. All of this work shares both a theoretical basis and a methodology. In this talk, Collin will describe the Frame Semantic work: how frames and their elements are defined, how examples of frames are chosen and annotated, and how generalizations are extracted from this data. He will also show how such semantic annotation can be created automatically, providing additional features for speech recognition and machine translation, with the potential to improve results of both processes.

Chuck will describe the Constructicon-building part of FrameNet work, where we are creating a registry of grammatical constructions, including their syntactic descriptions, informal accounts of their contribution to the meaning of the phrases they shape, and collections of examples of sentences in which expressions that instance each given expression are annotated according to their syntactic components. The existence of constructions that are more than the sum of the words they contain provides challenges for parsing, translation, and speech understanding and generation as in the sentence "Bears have become largely, and pandas entirely, non-carnivorous."