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Exploring Crosslinguistic Frame Alignment

The FrameNet (FN) project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (ICSI), which documents the core vocabulary of contemporary English, was the first lexical resource based on Fillmore’s theory of Frame Semantics. Berkeley FrameNet has inspired related projects in roughly a dozen other languages, which have evolved somewhat independently; the current Multilingual FrameNet project (MLFN) is an attempt to find alignments between all of them. The alignment problem is complicated by the fact that these projects have adhered to the Berkeley FrameNet model to varying degrees, and they were also founded at different times, when different versions of the Berkeley FrameNet data were available. We describe several new methods for finding relations of similarity between semantic frames across languages. We will demonstrate ViToXF, a new tool which provides interactive visualizations of these cross-lingual relations, between frames, lexical units, and frame elements, based on resources such as multilingual dictionaries and on shared distributional vector spaces, making clear the strengths and weaknesses of different alignment methods.