FrameNet Meets the Semantic Web: A DAML+OIL Frame Representation

The Berkeley FrameNet Project (Baker, Fillmore, & Lowe 1998; Fillmore & Baker 2001) (URL: http:// framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/ ̃framenet) is creating an online lexical resource for English, based on the principles of Frame Semantics and supported by corpus evidence. A semantic frame is a script-like structure of inferences, which are linked to the meanings of linguistic units (lexical items). Each frame identifies a set of frame elements (FEs), which are framespecific semantic roles (participants, props, phases of a state of affairs). Our description of each lexical item identifies the frames which underlie a given meaning and the ways in which the FEs are realized in structures headed by the word. The FrameNet database documents the range of semantic and syntactic combinatory possibilities (valences) of each word in each of its senses, through manual annotation of example sentences and automatic summarization of the resulting annotations. The FrameNet database is available in XML, and can be displayed and queried via the web and other interfaces. The FrameNet I data has also been translated into the DAML+OIL extension to XML and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which can represent our ontologies and to make FrameNet information machine readable and understandable. We have developed an automatic translator from FrameNet 1 data in XML to DAML+OIL; this paper reports on our representation of this data in DAML+OIL.