O’Hara and Wiebe (2009) provide an inventory of semantic relations derived from the frame elements of FrameNet, along with a mapping identifying what was done for semantic roles occurring at least 50 times. They also discuss a number of other schemes for identifying a set of basic semantic relations or roles. Marquez et al. (2008) also discuss the nature of semantic roles , particularly noting the lack of agreement among linguistic researchers. In all these cases, a common thread is that researcher’s judgment has been used to develop these basic inventories.  While these inventories appear to be reasonable, I would like something more data-driven. I suggest that the frame-to-frame relations in the FrameNet database can be used as the basis for a more principled identification of primitive frame elements. The methods I suggest use a digraph analysis of a dictionary of frame elements constructed out of individual mappings developed in the FrameNet project itself.

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Current electronic dictionaries are presently little more than transcriptions of paper dictionaries. To be sure, they have a lot more information than is present in the print versions. But, they are not really designed to support natural language processing. The major needs of the future are: (1) a set of instances illustrating each sense of an entry; (2) sufficient structured information to permit disambiguation to reach each sense; and (3) a representation of the meaning of each sense for use in NLP. (more…)

A construction pattern attempts to characterize the usage of each sense in such a way that it can be used to disambiguate among the several senses of a word. Constructions are becoming more widely used, as described in Atkins & Rundell, The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. The authors describe patterns for verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, but they do not describe such patterns for prepositions.

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