The FrameNet Project: Tools for Lexicon Building

The FrameNet Project is a lexicographic research project housed and administered at the International Computer Science Institute (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu), in Berkeley, California. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for funding the work of the project through two grants, IRI #9618838 \Tools for Lexicon Building" March 1997{February 2000, and ITR/HCI #0086132 \FrameNet++: An On-Line Lexical Semantic Resource and its Application to Speech and Language Technology" September 2000{August 2003. (We refer to these two stages in the life of the project as FrameNet I and FrameNet II.)

We also wish to acknowledge the support of Oxford University Press, which, through Timothy Benbow, made it possible for us to use the British National Corpus as the evidential basis for our inquiry into the behavior of English words, and also, through Robert Scriven, gave us permission to select de nitions from the Concise English Dictionary to serve as as parts of the FrameNet I lexical entries.

We are also indebted to the Institut fur Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung of the University of Stuttgart, through the kindness of Ulrich Heid and Oliver Christ, for the IMS Corpus Workbench software, which made it easy for us to extract, explore, and sort example lines and sentences from the BNC.

The Project is administered at the International Computer Science Institute: we are indebted to Jerome Feldman, Director of the Institute during most of the FrameNet I period - and a year and a half before our initial funding - and to Nelson Morgan, current ICSI Director, for their e orts in making available to us the services and facilities of this remarkably welcoming and well-run research community.

Charles J. Fillmore
March 7, 2001