The Multilingual FrameNet Shared Annotation Task : a Preliminary Report

This paper presents the shared annotation task devised by the Multilingual FrameNet project together with partner projects. The shared framenet annotation task intends to probe how comparable frames are across languages by annotating translated and comparable texts using the same semantic standards in multiple languages. This paper reports on the initial work of agreeing on annotation standards, building annotation tools, and the results from the first joint frame annotations, from a TED talk and its translation into Brazilian Portuguese. The results indicate that the joint annotation task is feasible with existing FrameNet frames: over 80% of frame-bearing words in the Brazilian Portuguese translation of the TED talk fit precisely in frames found in Berkeley FrameNet’s release 1.7. However, even languages as typologically similar as English and Brazilian Portuguese show some differences in density of framebearing words and the frequency of frame-bearing words by part-of-speech.