A General Framework for the Annotation of Causality Based on FrameNet

We present here a general set of semantic frames to annotate causal expressions, with a rich lexicon in French and an annotated corpus of about 5000 instances of causal lexical items with their corresponding semantic frames. The aim of our project is to have both the largest possible coverage of causal phenomena in French, across all parts of speech, and have it linked to a general semantic framework such as FN, to benefit in particular from the relations between other semantic frames, e.g., temporal ones or intentional ones, and the underlying upper lexical ontology that enable some forms of reasoning. This is part of the larger ASFALDA French FrameNet project, which focuses on a few different notional domains which are interesting in their own right (Djemma et al., 2016), including cognitive positions and communication frames. In the process of building the French lexicon and preparing the annotation of the corpus, we had to remodel some of the frames proposed in FN based on English data, with hopefully more precise frame definitions to facilitate human annotation. This includes semantic clarifications of frames and frame elements, redundancy elimination, and added coverage. The result is arguably a significant improvement of the treatment of causality in FN itself.