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Semantic Annotations in Japanese FrameNet: Comparing Frames in Japanese and English

Since 2008, the Japanese FrameNet (JFN, http://jfn.st.hc.keio.ac.jp/) project has been annotating the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), the first such corpus, officially released in October 2011. This paper reports annotation results of the book genre of BCCWJ (Ohara 2011, Ohara, Saito, Fujii & Sato 2011). Comparing the semantic frames needed to annotate BCCWJ with those that the FrameNet (FN) project (Fillmore and Baker 2009, Fillmore 2006) already has defined revealed that: 1) differences in the Japanese and English semantic frames often concern different perspectives and different lexical aspects exhibited by the two lexicons; and 2) in most of the cases where JFN defined new semantic frame for a word, the frame did not involve culture-specific scenes. We investigated the extent to which existing semantic frames originally defined for analyzing English words were used, annotating 810 sentences of the so-called core data of the book genre of BCCWJ. In the 810 sentences we were able to assign semantic frames to approximately 4000 words, although we could not assign any to 587 words. That is, of all the LUs in the sentences, we were able to identify semantic frames to about 87 per cent of them. In other words, the semantic frames already defined in FN for English could be used for 87 per cent of the Japanese LUs.