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Bilingual FrameNet Dictionaries for Machine Translation

Summary

The paper sets out the design of GermanFrameNet (GFN), a planned German lexical resource modeled on the English FrameNet built at ICSI Berkeley. Its motivation is that machine translation needs more than word-to-word correspondences: it must know how a shared meaning is expressed syntactically in each language. Grounded in Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982), GFN aims to build corpus-based entries for several thousand German verbs, nouns and adjectives. Each lexical unit records its frame elements and the phrase types and grammatical functions realizing them, supported by annotated corpus sentences.

The work runs in two phases. First, German fragments are created to mirror existing English FrameNet fragments, testing whether English-derived frames carry over to German. Second, the two lexicons are connected via shared frames and numerical indices to form a bilingual dictionary. Using the Communication-Statement frame as its example, the author argues for splitting senses by frame, a finer-grained treatment of polysemy than EuroWordNet's. No experiments are reported. The contribution is a resource design meant to help identify the closest translation equivalent.

Key points

  • GFN targets several thousand German lexical units (verbs, nouns, adjectives) across multiple semantic domains, following the FrameNet database structure.
  • English FrameNet entries combine a frame, the syntactic realizations of its frame elements (e.g., NP.Ext, PP_by.Comp, CNI/DNI/INI null instantiation), annotated example sentences, and relations to other frames. The British National Corpus is FrameNet's main corpus.
  • The Communication-Statement frame (Speaker, Addressee, Message, Topic) serves as the worked example, with verbs such as announce, admit, mention, tell and talk, and nouns such as announcement.
  • Cross-lingual linking relies on common semantic frames plus numerical indexing of individual senses.
  • GFN is framed as a lexicographic, contrastive database rather than an NLP system, with machine translation as the main intended application.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Semantic role labeling · Machine translation

Cited by

25 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 21 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{boas2002bilingual,
  title = {{Bilingual FrameNet Dictionaries for Machine Translation}},
  author = {Boas, Hans C.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.63317/4otx22fqqe89},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4otx22fqqe89}
}

References

23 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Baker, C.F., C.J. Fillmore, and J.B. Lowe, 1998. The Berkeley FrameNet Project. In COLING-ACL ’98: Proceedings of the Conference, held at the University of Montréal. find our card
  2. Boas, H.C., 2000. Resultative Constructions in English and German. Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. find
  3. Boas, H.C., 2001. Frame Semantics as a framework for describing polysemy and syntactic structures of English and German motion verbs in contrastive computational lexicography. In P. Rayson, A. Wilson, T. McEnery, A. Hardie, and S. Khoja (eds.), Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2001. find
  4. Dorr, B., 1990. Solving Thematic Divergences in Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 28 th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh. find our card
  5. Emele, M. 1994. TFS – The Typed Feature Structure Representation Formalism. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Sharable Natural Language Resources (SNLR). find
  6. Corresponding indexing links will thus link 20(1) with 19(2) as well as the corresponding entry for accompany. find
  7. Fillmore, C.J., 1982. Frame Semantics. In The Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin. find
  8. Fillmore, C.J., and B.T.S. Atkins, 1992. Toward a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbours. In A. Lehrer and E. Kittay (eds.), Frame, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. find
  9. Fillmore, C.J., and B.T.S. Atkins, 1994. Starting where the dictionaries stop: the challenge for computational lexicography. In B.T.S. Atkins and A. Zampolli (eds.), Computational Approaches to the Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  10. Fillmore, C.J., and B.T.S. Atkins, 1998. FrameNet and Lexicographic Relevance. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. find
  11. Fillmore, C. J., and B.T.S. Atkins, 2000. Describing Polysemy: The Case of ‘Crawl’. In Y. Ravin and C. Laecock (eds.), Polysemy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  12. Fontenelle, T., 2000. A Bilingual Database for Frame Semantics. International Journal of Lexicography: 232-248. find
  13. Kameyama, M., R. Ochitani, and S. Peters, 1991. Resolving Translation Mismatches with Information Flow. In ACL-29. find
  14. Lowe, J.B., C.F. Baker, and C.J. Fillmore, 1997. A frame-semantic approach to semantic annotation. In M. Light (ed.), Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What and How? Special Interest Group on the Lexicon, Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
  15. Heid, U.,1994. Contrastive Classes – Relating Monolingual Dictionaries to Build an MT Dictionary. In F. Kiefer, G. Kiss, and J. Pajzs (eds.), Papers in Computational Lexicography – COMPLEX 1993. find
  16. Heid, U., and K. Krüger, 1996. A Multilingual Lexicon based on Frame Semantics. In Proceedings of the AISB Workshop on Multilinguality in the Lexicon, Brighton. find
  17. Johnson, C., C.J. Fillmore, E. Wood, J. Ruppenhofer, M. Urban, M. Petruck, C. Baker, 2001. The FrameNet Project: Tools for Lexicon Building. Manuscript. Berkeley, CA, International Computer Science Institute. find
  18. Miller, G., R. Beckwith, C. Fellbaum, D. Gross, and K. Miller, 1990. Five Papers on WordNet. CSL Report 43. Cognitive Science Laboratory. Princeton University. find
  19. Peters, W., I. Peters, and P. Vossen, 1998. Automatic Sense Clustering in EuroWordNet. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. find
  20. Petruck, M. 1996. Frame Semantics. In J.-O. Östman, J. Blommaert, and C. Bulcaen (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. find
  21. Snell-Hornby, M. 1983. Verb descriptivity in English and German: A contrastive study in semantic fields. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. find
  22. Vossen, P., and L. Bloksma, 1998. Categories and Classifications in EuroWordNet. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. find
  23. Vossen, P., W. Peters, and J. Gonzalo, 1999. Towards a Universal Index of Meaning. In Proceedings of the ACL-99 SIGLEX workshop, University of Maryland. find

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