Framing Fluid Construction Grammar

Framing Fluid Construction Grammar Vanessa Micelli (vanessa@csl.sony.fr) Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris 6 Rue Amyot, 75005 Paris, France Remi van Trijp (remi@csl.sony.fr) Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris 6 Rue Amyot, 75005 Paris, France Joachim De Beule (joachim@arti.vub.ac.be) VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium Abstract In this paper, we propose a concrete operationalization which incorporates data from the FrameNet database into Fluid Con- struction Grammar, currently the only computational imple- mentation of construction grammar that can achieve both pro- duction and parsing using the same set of constructions. As a proof of concept, we selected an annotated sentence from the FrameNet database and transcribed its frame annotation anal- ysis into an FCG grammar. The paper illustrates the proposed constructions and discusses the value and results of these for- malization efforts. Keywords: Fluid Construction Grammar; FrameNet; Frame Semantics; Grammar Formalism Introduction Construction Grammar (CG) and Frame Semantics (FS) are considered to be sister theories in cognitive linguistics. FS investigates the frames of semantic knowledge that a lan- guage user needs in order to produce and comprehend words successfully, whereas CG tries to describe the constructions (i.e. meaning-form mappings) of a language. However, even though many construction grammarians subscribe their work to FS, most analyses only focus on the “skeletal meanings” (Goldberg, 1995, p. 28) that underlie grammatical construc- tions, and leave the exact integration of FS and CG under- specified. This gap may cause inconsistencies in the develop- ment of both theories and leaves a lot of crucial issues unad- dressed within cognitive linguistics. In this paper, we therefore propose a concrete operational- ization that overcomes this problem by using data from the FrameNet project (Baker, Fillmore, & Lowe, 1998) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) (De Beule & Steels, 2005; Steels & De Beule, 2006), a computational formalism that allows researchers to test their hypotheses for both produc- tion and parsing. More specifically, we focus on a hand-made example 1 that serves as a proof-of-concept for our approach, and we discuss possible research avenues for the future such as the automatic incorporation of FrameNet data into FCG. 1 Given the space limitations of this paper and the elaborate an- notation of the example sentence, it is impossible to show a com- plete trace of production or parsing. Interested readers can therefore check the complete and interactive demonstration of the example at www.fcg-net.org/framenet/. We believe that a computational formalization is a crucial aspect of empirical science because it makes the sometimes fuzzy aspects of linguistic theories explicit and because it re- veals consequences of a theory that would have otherwise been overlooked. This paper is structured as follows: in the next section, we briefly introduce the FrameNet project and Fluid Construc- tion Grammar and explain our motivations for coupling the two with each other. We then discuss the example sentence that we implemented and show what we had to add to its an- notation to arrive at an operational result. We then look at some of the lexical and grammatical constructions that we implemented and how they are processed by FCG. Finally, we discuss the obtained results and insights and we briefly touch upon future efforts. Tying the knot between FrameNet and FCG Since Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics are both based on the same theoretical foundations, it is only natural to investigate how their existing implementations could possibly profit from each other and what would be the best and most advantageous way of doing so. In this section, we briefly in- troduce FrameNet and FCG, and we motivate why the com- bination of both forms a powerful tool for investigating both the semantic and grammatical properties of constructions. FrameNet The FrameNet database (Baker et al., 1998) presents a huge online database containing more than 10.000 English lexi- cal units (LUs) and, more recently, similar efforts for several other languages such as German and Japanese. All lexical units are annotated with their semantic frames based on ex- ample sentences in which the respective frames and frame elements are marked. The corpus-oriented approach of the FrameNet project makes that it is tightly connected to empiri- cal observations. Unfortunately, no computational implemen- tation exists of how these annotated frames can be processed in either production or parsing. Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) Fluid Construction Grammar (De Beule & Steels, 2005; Steels & De Beule, 2006) is a fully operational grammar for-