BioFrameNet: A Domain-Specific FrameNet Extension with Links to Biomedical Ontologies

Biomedical domain ontologies could be better put to use for automatic semantic linguistic processing if we could map them to lexical resources that model the linguistic phenomena encountered in this domain, e.g., complex noun phrase structures that reference specific biological entity names and processes. In this paper, we introduce BioFrameNet – a domain-specific FrameNet extension. BioFrameNet uses Frame semantics to express the meaning of natural language, is augmented with domain-specific semantic relations, and links to biomedical ontologies like the Gene Ontology – all of which are expressed in the Description Logic (DL) variant of OWL. Thus, BioFrameNet annotations of natural-language text precisely map to biomedical ontologies, which in turn facilitates inference using DL reasoners.