Large-scale Cross-lingual Language Resources for Referencing and Framing

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3162–3171 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3162 Large-scale Cross-lingual Language Resources for Referencing and Framing Piek Vossena, Filip Ilievskia, Marten Postmaa, Antske Fokkensa, Gosse Minnemab, Levi Remijnsea aVrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands {piek.vossen,f.ilievski, m.c.postma, antske.fokkens, l.remijnse}@vu.nl bRijksuniversiteit Groningen Oude Kijk in ’t Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Groningen, The Netherlands g.f.minnema@rug.nl Abstract In this article, we lay out the basic ideas and principles of the project Framing Situations in the Dutch Language. We provide our first results of data acquisition, together with the first data release. We introduce the notion of cross-lingual referential corpora. These corpora consist of texts that make reference to exactly the same incidents. The referential grounding allows us to analyze the framing of these incidents in different languages and across different texts. During the project, we will use the automatically generated data to study linguistic framing as a phenomenon, build framing resources such as lexicons and corpora. We expect to capture larger variation in framing compared to traditional approaches for building such resources. Our first data release, which contains structured data about a large number of incidents and reference texts, can be found at http://dutchframenet.nl/data-releases/. Keywords: framing, FrameNet, reference. situation semantics, events, cross-lingual text corpora 1. Introduction We use language to tell stories and reflect on situations in the world. We describe these situations in many differ- ent ways, which often reflects different perspectives. Al- though there are many corpora capturing language, hardly any of these also represent the actual situations that texts refer to, let alone provide indications of which texts refer to the same situation. Event coreference corpora could serve this purpose as they are annotated for mentions of the same event. However, available event coreference corpora are very small and they exhibit hardly any ambiguity, i.e. there typically is one referent for each expression, nor variation, i.e. there are only one or few expressions for each referent (Ilievski et al., 2016; Postma et al., 2016). Not having sufficient texts that refer to the same or similar situations, or not knowing which texts do, makes it diffi- cult to investigate the different ways in which people make reference. It also hampers the development of systems to automatically resolve (cross-document) coreference and to understand and develop technology that detects how events are framed. Imagine you want to create a text corpus that represents the language used to describe murders. How to proceed? You can use public corpora such as the Gigaword corpus (Napoles et al., 2012) and search for texts using keywords. How many murders will you find and will you find all mur- ders? Referring to events as murder is actually already sub- jective and may miss situations that some people describe differently. Even if you get a substantial amount of texts about murders, we still do not know which texts make ref- erence to the same murder. …

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