The Berkeley FrameNet Project

The Berkeley FrameNet Project Collin F. Baker and Charles J. Fillmore and John B. Lowe {collinb, fillmore, jblowe}@icsi.berkeley.edu International Computer Science Institute 1947 Center St. Suite 600 Berkeley, Calif., 94704 Abstract FrameNet is a three-year NSF-supported project in corpus-based computational lexicog- raphy, now in its second year (NSF IRI-9618838, "Tools for Lexicon Building"). The project's key features are (a) a commitment to corpus evidence for semantic and syntactic generaliza- tions, and (b) the representation of the valences of its target words (mostly nouns, adjectives, and verbs) in which the semantic portion makes use of frame semantics. The resulting database will contain (a) descriptions of the semantic frames underlying the meanings of the words de- scribed, and (b) the valence representation (se- mantic and syntactic) of several thousand words and phrases, each accompanied by (c) a repre- sentative collection of annotated corpus attes- tations, which jointly exemplify the observed linkings between "frame elements" and their syntactic realizations (e.g. grammatical func- tion, phrase type, and other syntactic traits). This report will present the project's goals and workflow, and information about the computa- tional tools that have been adapted or created in-house for this work. 1 Introduction The Berkeley FrameNet project 1 is producing frame-semantic descriptions of several thousand English lexical items and backing up these de- scriptions with semantically annotated attesta- tions from contemporary English corpora 2. 1The project is based at the International Computer Science Institute (1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA). A fuller bibliography may be found in (Lowe et ai., 1997) 2Our main corpus is the British National Corpus. We have access to it through the courtesy of Oxford University Press; the POS-tagged and lemmatized ver- sion we use was prepared by the Institut flit Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung of the University of Stuttgart). The These descriptions are based on hand-tagged semantic annotations of example sentences ex- tracted from large text corpora and systematic analysis of the semantic patterns they exem- plify by lexicographers and linguists. The pri- mary emphasis of the project therefore is the encoding, by humans, of semantic knowledge in machine-readable form. The intuition of the lexicographers is guided by and constrained by the results of corpus-based research using high- performance software tools. The semantic domains to be covered are" HEALTH CARE, CHANCE, PERCEPTION, COMMU- NICATION, TRANSACTION, TIME, SPACE, BODY (parts and functions of the body), MOTION, LIFE STAGES, SOCIAL CONTEXT, EMOTION and COG- NITION. 1.1 Scope of the Project The results of the project are (a) a lexical re- source, called the FrameNet database 3, and (b) associated software tools. The database has three major components (described in more de- tail below: • Lexicon containing entries which are com- posed of: (a) some conventional dictionary-type data, mainly for the sake of human readers; (b) FOR- MULAS which capture the morphosyntactic ways in which elements of the semantic frame can be realized within the phrases or sentences built up around the word; (c) links to semantically ANNOTATED EXAM- European collaborators whose participation has made this possible are Sue Atkins, …

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