Global FrameNet Tuesdays | Exploring Semantic Frame Relations across Languages
Channel: FrameNet Brasil
Date: 2021-11-09

Separate research projects have developed Frame Semantic lexical databases for roughly a dozen languages (including Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Swedish, among others) based in varying degrees on the original ICSI FrameNet structure, methodology, and annotation practices (Ruppenhofer et al. 2016).  We will explore the extent to which semantic frames are similar across languages.  The underlying research questions include:
• To what extent are semantic frames the same cross-culturally and cross-linguistically? 
• Where framings differ, what are the reasons for these differences?
• Should we expect translations to be ``frame preserving''?

The FrameNet team has developed algorithms to find alignments across these FrameNets, using both symbolic and statistical approaches and utilizing the internal structure of the FrameNets, such as the number and type of frame elements and their definitions.  In order to take full advantage of annotation data in different FrameNet databases, BERT models were used to obtain contextual embeddings of LUs. First, using aligned corpora from EUROPARL, multilingual BERT (Devlin et al. 2019) was re-trained (fine-tuned) for each language with the objective of aligning word vectors across languages. This step is necessary because, although this version of BERT is multilingual, it doesn't force words with the same meaning  in different languages to be close in the embedding space. Then each annotated sentence was processed to create a vector for the LU in that specific sentence. The final embedding of each LU is the centroid (average) of all of its vectors in the annotated sentences. One type of alignment score between a pair of frames is obtained by measuring the distance between their LUs in this LU embedding space.

The team has also built an interactive tool called ViToXF for the visualization of alignments of frames (and LUs) across languages, which we will demonstrate during the talk.  The GUI allows the user to choose the frames to be compared, choose one of seven alignment techniques, and set parameters to control the number of alignments to be displayed. We will also present some preliminary results on evaluating the accuracy of the alignments. Both the database of alignment vectors and the visualization tool are available at https://github.com/icsi-berkeley/framenet-multilingual-alignment/releases/tag/1.0.3-2.


Global FrameNet Tuesdays are a continuation of the successful International FrameNet Workshop 2020 (IFNW 2020) that went online due to COVID-19 and reached a wide audience within the worldwide community working on framenets, beyond those listed in GlobalFrameNet.