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Superframes: A Schema for Lexicon-free Frame-semantic Annotation

Semantic frame, role, and relation labels are important parts of symbolic meaning representations. The mainstream approach is to define large language-specific lexicons that map predicate senses to their frame and argument labels, and to use separate label inventories for modifiers. Maintaining lexicons is very labor-intensive and scales poorly to the multilingual case. There are schemas that aim to simplify the annotation task using a more coarse-grained inventory of frames and roles, but suffer from a lack of systematicity and clear definitions. We present a schema that 1) uses a small inventory of frames and roles for lexicon-free annotation, 2) systematizes the frame inventory by factoring out aspect and mode, 3) has a unified vocabulary for arguments and modifiers, and 4) is designed to be annotated atop Universal Dependencies syntactic annotation. We argue for the adoption of such a schema for multilingual annotation and demonstrate promising results in annotation experiments on German.