FrameNet and ontolex

Dear All,

I have been thinking about modeling FrameNet with the W3C Ontology-Lexicon Model (as formalized in the PDF document sent by Philipp on  June 7th). 

I came to the conclusion that FrameNet doesn't include any peculiarity we should worry about. 

Frames (e.g. "Motion") and their constituent Frame Elements (=semantic roles e.g.  Goal, Source, Path, Direction ,Theme etc.) need to be represented at the ontological level. In principle, they are kind of ONTOLOGY ENTITY in our model. Of course one could argue about the "place" of frames in a (reference) ontology. I will skip this discussion here, though I'd point you to Aldo's work on "OntoFrameNet" (and knowledge patterns) as well as to Jeff Scheffczyk's effort on porting FrameNet in OWL DL (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/fnbibliography/author/143) 

Frames and Frame Elements "evoke" Lexical Units (e.g. the frame "Motion" evokes the verb "travel" - and several others, of couse): accordingly, lexical units would simply map to LEXICAL ENTRY in the ontolex model. LEXICAL SENSE would represent the disambiguated sense of LEXICAL UNIT, e.g. travel#1 (assuming WordNet as lexical resource). Closing the loop, this sense would then be contained in the synset:	

• S: (v) travel#1, go#1, move#1, locomote#1 (change location; move, travel, or proceed, also metaphorically) "How fast does your new car go?"; "We travelled from Rome to Naples by bus"; "The policemen went from door to door looking for the suspect"; "The soldiers moved towards the city in an attempt to take it before night fell"; "news travelled fast"

I think this example is pretty straightforward, though an interesting issue may raise: how do we model the "evoke" relation? 

If we accept that Frames are Ontological Entity, do we want to state that "evoke" is a special relationship holding between Frames and Lexical Entries or does it make sense to generalize and claim that every Ontology Entity evoke a Lexical Entry? If we go for the second option, then "evoke" will correspond to  the inverse of "denotes". 


Best,

Alessandro




Alessandro Oltramari
Research Associate
Psychology Department, Carnegie Mellon University
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