FrameNet

In computational linguistics, FrameNet is a project housed at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California which produces an electronic resource based on a theory of meaning called frame semantics. FrameNet reveals for example that the sentence "John sold a car to Mary" essentially describes the same basic situation (semantic frame) as "Mary bought a car from John", just from a different perspective. A semantic frame can be thought of as a conceptual structure describing an event, relation, or object and the participants in it. The FrameNet lexical database contains over 1,200 semantic frames, 13,000 lexical units (a pairing of a word with a meaning; polysemous words are represented by several lexical units) and 202,000 example sentences. FrameNet is largely the creation of Charles J. Fillmore, who developed the theory of frame semantics that the project is based on, and was initially the project leader when the project began in 1997. Collin Baker became the project manager in 2000. The FrameNet project has been influential in both linguistics and natural language processing, where it led to the task of automatic Semantic Role Labeling.

A frame is a schematic representation of a situation involving various participants, props, and other conceptual roles. Examples of frame names are Being_born and Locative_relation. A frame in FrameNet contains a textual description of what it represents (a frame definition), associated frame elements, lexical units, example sentences, and frame-to-frame relations.

Frame elements (FE) provide additional information to the semantic structure of a sentence. Each frame has a number of core and non-core FEs which can be thought of as semantic roles. Core FEs are essential to the meaning of the frame while non-core FEs are generally descriptive (such as time, place, manner, etc.).

Some examples include:

FrameNet includes shallow data on syntactic roles that frame elements play in the example sentences. For an example sentence like "She was born about AD 460", FrameNet would mark "She" as a noun phrase referring to the Child FE, and "about AD 460" as a noun phrase corresponding to the Time frame element. Details of how frame elements can be realized in a sentence are important because this reveals important information about the subcategorization frames as well as possible diathesis alternations (e.g. "John broke the window" vs. "The window broke") of a verb.

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