Putting Frames in Perspective

Putting Frames in Perspective Nancy Chang, Srini Narayanan, and Miriam R.L. Petruck International Computer Science Institute 1947 Center St., Suite 600, Berkeley, CA 94704 � nchang,snarayan,miriamp � @icsi.berkeley.edu Abstract This paper attempts to bridge the gap between FrameNet frames and inference. We describe a computational formalism that captures structural re- lationships among participants in a dynamic sce- nario. This representation is used to describe the internal structure of FrameNet frames in terms of parameters for event simulations. We apply our for- malism to the commerce domain and show how it provides a flexible means of accounting for linguis- tic perspective and other inferential effects. 1 Introduction FrameNet (Fillmore et al., 2001) is an online lex- ical resource1 designed according to the principles of frame semantics (Fillmore, 1985; Petruck, 1996). It thus takes as foundational the assumptions that (1) lexical items draw on rich conceptual structures, or frames, for their meaning and function; and (2) conceptually related lexical items may foreground different aspects of the same background frame. Verbs involved with commercial events serve as canonical examples: (1) a. Chuck bought a car from Jerry for $1000. b. Jerry sold a car to Chuck for $1000. c. Chuck paid Jerry $1000 for a car. d. Jerry charged Chuck $1000 for a car. e. Chuck spent $1000 on a car. The sentences in (1) might describe the same inter- action – in which one individual (Chuck) transfers money ($1000) to another (Jerry) in exchange for some goods (a car) – but differ in the perspective they impose on the scene. The shared inferential structure of verbs like buy and sell is captured in FrameNet by the COMMERCE frame, which is associated with a set of situational 1http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet/ roles, or frame elements (FEs), corresponding to event participants and props. These FEs are used to annotate sentences like those in (1), yielding: (2) a. [Chuck]Buyer bought [a car]Goods [from Jerry]Seller [for $1000]Payment. b. [Jerry]Seller sold [a car]Goods [to Chuck]Buyer [for $1000]Payment. FE tags act as a shorthand that allows diverse verbs to tap into a common subset of encyclopedic knowl- edge. Moreover, regularities in the set of FEs real- ized with specific lexical items can be taken as cor- related with their favored perspective. A significant gap remains, however, between the unstructured and intuitively chosen tag sets used in FrameNet and a formal characterization of the inter- related actions and relations holding among them. An explicit representation of such frame-semantic information is needed to fully realize FrameNet’s potential use in text understanding and inference (Fillmore and Baker, 2001). In this paper we at- tempt to bridge the gap by defining a formalism that unpacks the shorthand of frames into structured event representations. These dynamic representa- tions allow annotated FrameNet data to parameter- ize event simulations (Narayanan, 1999b) that pro- duce fine-grained, context-sensitive inferences. We illustrate our formalism for the COMMERCE frame and show how it can account for some of the wide- ranging consequences of perspective-taking. 2 The FrameNet COMMERCE frame The FrameNet project …

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