An Analysis of Frame Semantics of Continuous Processes

Qualitative Process theory provides a formal representation for human-like models of continuous processes. Prior research mapped qualitative process elements onto English language constructions, but did not connect the representations to existing frame semantic resources. Here we identify and classify QP language constituents through their instantiation in FrameNet frames to provide a unified semantics for linguistic and non-linguistic representations of processes. We demonstrate that all core QP relations can map to FN, though larger QP evoking phrasal constructions do exist outside of this mapping. We conclude with a corpus analysis showing that these frames occur in natural text involving a variety of continuous processes.