A Descriptive Study of Metaphors and Frames in the Multilingual Shared Annotation Task (2022)

Abstract: This work assumes that languages are structured by semantic frames, which are schematic representations of concepts. Metaphors, on the other hand, are cognitive projections between domains, which are the result of our interaction in the world, through experiences, expectations and human biology itself. In this work, we use both semantic frames and metaphors in multilingual contrast (Brazilian Portuguese, English and German). The aim is to present a descriptive study of metaphors and frames in the multilingual shared annotation task of Multilingual FrameNet, a task which consisted of using frames from Berkeley FrameNet to annotate a parallel corpora. The result shows parameters for cross-linguistic annotation considering frames and metaphors.

## introduction understanding human language requires activating cognitive models of socially shared knowledge. the linguistic units, whether lexical or constructional items, evoke possibilities of meaning defined in the context of linguistic-conceptual models, which are called semantic frames @xcite . the computational implementation of frames was created at the end of the 20th century for the english language by the framenet project. the semantic frames methodology was later expanded to other languages, including brazilian portuguese @xcite . motivated by the interest in frame comparison in a multilingual perspective, multilingual framenet completed its first task, which consisted of the parallel corpora annotation of the ted talk "do schools kill creativity?" @xcite . this work tests the alignment of its linguistic databases with the frames defined for english. the goal is to establish the means of creating multilingual lexical resources as well as a semantically referenced machine translator @xcite . this article shows a comparative study of metaphors found in these linguistic annotations for brazilian portuguese, english and german. bringing the results together, we have a set of metaphorical metadata in terms of metaphors and frames. the work brought together the theoretical contributions of frame semantics, created by @xcite , and the conceptual theory of metaphor, compiled by @xcite . both theories have computational applications: framenet @xcite and metanet @xcite . the present work follows the methodological guidelines of framenet and uses metanet in order to explore the metaphors described in its network. the text is organized as follows: section 2 presents frame semantics and the conceptual theory of metaphor are presented; section 3 discusses semantic frames and translation studies; section 4 explains the multilingual annotation task; section 5 presents the parameterization of metaphorical metadata, and section 6 presents the summary and mentions some directions to take in a future work. ## the multilingual annotation task the first task of the multilingual framenet initiative was to create a semantically refined linguistic analysis sample that would allow database alignment tests. framenets developed for different lan-guages were responsible for annotating parallel corpora aligned at the sentence level. these annotations were produced using the text of a conference in the ted talk model @xcite 1 . the analyses were carried out using the fulltext annotation method, which consists of all semantic frame-evoking lexical units being submitted for annotation. the semantic frames used for the annotation task were those from berkeley framenet, which highlights the initiative of developing computer applications for multilingual alignment purposes based on the berkeley framenet database @xcite . figure 1 shows an example of the annotation in english. the highlighted items are the lexical units under analysis. each lexical unit evokes a frame, and the frame, in turn, brings a series of elements, the so-called frame elements, all named specifically in relation to the frame they belong to, as shown in the lower description of the respective figures. in addition to the semantic analysis, the syntactic treatment is also included. it distinguishes the grammatical functions of frame elements as well as their phrase types. for this reason, the linguistic analysis of a framenet is commonly called a threelayer annotation. although other layers may exist, the three essential ones are: essentially, frame element (fe), grammatical function (gf) and phrasal type (pt). ## the parameterization of metaphorical metadata in this present work, fifty sentences from the corpus were analyzed. one of the procedures adopted was to start the comparative study using the metaphors in the brazilian portuguese text and, then, to interpret such translation choices in german and check the original text in english. the result of this process is a set of analyses that indicate paths to a descriptive method of extracting semantic information. the parameters for the metaphorical comparison considering the frames evoked in the three languages were: total, directly related, indirectly related, and unrelated. the analysis took into account the metaphorical projections in brazilian portuguese. as shown through the examples, a metaphor in brazilian portuguese may have resulted from different translation options of the original in english, and the correlation with the german version also occurred in different ways. sentences © 2014, 2021 framenetbrasil project idsentence sentence 1043 what you have there is a person of extraordinary desirability [ evaluee dedication] who found a talent. what you have there is a [ person person] of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. person people [ entity what] [ topical_entity you] have have_associated [ place there] is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. what you have there is [ perceiver a person of extraordinary dedication] [ perceiver who] found locating [ sought_entity a talent]. what you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent capability .[ entity cni][ event dni] ted_creativity_corpus : doc_ted_en what you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. the parallel corpora contrasts each corpus to the original. in another regularity was the directly related. frame-to-frame relations foot_0 are the evidence for such a match. the frame evoked in english and brazilian portuguese is bringing, while in german it is cause_motion. checking the frame network, there is a direct relation between them, as cause_motion is used by bringing. in this relation, not all frame elements of cause_motion occur linguistically in bringing. however, there is a part of its structure presupposed as what is considered a conceptual background. checking the network of frames, we notice that locating uses seeking, which, through the see_also relation, links to the scrutiny frame, which, in turn, uses becoming_aware. even though they are indirectly related on the network of framenet frames, the annotation divergence seems to be in the choice between the metaphorical source and target domains. locating is a frame related to the source domain, while becoming_aware relates to the metaphorical target domain. the other pattern in frame comparison was unrelated. in ## summary this paper compared metaphors and frames in the framenet multilingual annotation task. the result of this process is a set of analyses that indicate paths to a descriptive method of extracting semantic information from framenet database. future work may validate the taxonomy presented in a larger sample of semantically annotated parallel corpus and expand the analysis to other languages. beyond that, including computational works on multilingual approaches to frame semantics and metaphors can contribute to a method to automatically parameterize these data.