Towards reference-aware FrameNet representations:Bridging generic and specific event knowledge

Abstract

FrameNet (Baker et al., 2003) is a resource that encodes conceptual and linguistic knowledge in the form of frames: information packages defining word senses and semantic roles associated with a particular type of event, situation or concept. FrameNet is a rich resource for describing how events and situations can be conceptualized in language in different ways, but is limited by its focus on lexical semantics and lack of a notion of reference: a frame-semantic analysis of the event descriptions in (1) would tell us that both describe the same event type (i.e., a commercial transaction, conceptualized from two different perspectives), but not whether they in fact describe the same event token in the real world. (1) a. Yesterday, John sold Mary a book. b. A woman bought a novel in the shop. To address this limitation, we are currently developing a new FrameNet-based resource, comprising a lexical database, annotated corpus and a semantic parser, that is ‘referentially enriched’ in two ways: frame annotations are linked, on one hand, to referential information from an ontology of real-world event tokens, and on the other hand to truth-conditional meaning representations