  Prepositions are an important vehicle for indicating semantic roles. Their
meanings are difficult to analyze and they are often discarded in processing
text. The Preposition Project is designed to provide a comprehensive database
of preposition senses suitable for use in natural language processing
applications. In the project, prepositions in the FrameNet corpus are
disambiguated using a sense inventory from a current dictionary, guided by a
comprehensive treatment of preposition meaning. The methodology provides a
framework for identifying and characterizing semantic roles, a gold standard
corpus of instances for further analysis, and an account of semantic role
alternation patterns. By adhering to this methodology, it is hoped that a
comprehensive and improved characterization of preposition behavior (semantic
role identification, and syntactic and semantic properties of the preposition
complement and attachment point) will be developed. The databases generated in
the project are publicly available for further use by researchers and
application developers.
