Representing Context in FrameNet: A Multidimensional, Multimodal Approach

Frame Semantics includes context as a central aspect of the theory. Frames themselves can be regarded as a representation of the immediate context against which meaning is to be construed. Moreover, the notion of frame invocation includes context as one possible source of information comprehenders use to construe meaning. As the original implementation of Frame Semantics, Berkeley FrameNet is capable of providing computational representations of some aspects of context, but not all of them. In this article, we present FrameNet Brasil: a framenet enriched with qualia relations and capable of taking other semiotic modes as input data, namely pictures and videos. We claim that such an enriched model is capable of addressing other types of contextual information in a framenet, namely sentence-level cotext and commonsense knowledge. We demonstrate how the FrameNet Brasil software infrastructure addresses contextual information in both database construction and corpora annotation. We present the guidelines for the construction of two multimodal datasets whose annotations represent contextual information and also report on two experiments: (i) the identification of frame-evoking lexical units in sentences and (ii) a methodology for domain adaptation in Neural Machine Translation that leverages frames and qualia for representing sentence-level context. Experimental results emphasize the importance of computationally representing contextual information in a principled structured fashion as opposed to trying to derive it from the manipulation of linguistic form alone.