Cross-lingual Linking of Automatically Constructed Frames and FrameNet

A semantic frame is a conceptual structure describing an event, relation, or object along with its participants. Several semantic frame resources have been manually elaborated, and there has been much interest in the possibility of applying semantic frames designed for a particular language to other languages, which has led to the development of cross-lingual frame knowledge. However, manually developing such cross-lingual lexical resources is labor-intensive. To support the development of such resources, this paper presents an attempt at automatic cross-lingual linking of automatically constructed frames and manually crafted frames. Specifically, we link automatically constructed example-based Japanese frames to English FrameNet by using cross-lingual word embeddings and a two-stage model that first extracts candidate FrameNet frames for each Japanese frame by taking only the frame-evoking words into account, then finds the best alignment of frames by also taking frame elements into account. Experiments using frame-annotated sentences in Japanese FrameNet indicate that our approach will facilitate the manual development of cross-lingual frame resources.