Please have a look at our work:

• Type a word into the "Search" box (upper left) to see if FrameNet has it.
• Use the FrameGrapher to browse the network of frames, or
• Click on the "View FrameNet data" link at the left.

Active research projects are now seeking to produce comparable frame-semantic lexicons for other languages and to devise means of automatically labeling running text with semantic frame information.

A lexical unit (LU) is a pairing of a word with a meaning. Typically, each sense of a polysemous word belongs to a different semantic frame, a script-like conceptual structure that describes a particular type of situation, object, or event and the participants and props involved in it. For example, the Apply_heat frame describes a common situation involving a Cook, some Food, and a Heating_Instrument, and is evoked by words such as bake, blanch, boil, broil, brown, simmer, steam, etc. We call these roles frame elements (FEs) and the frame-evoking words are LUs in the Apply_heat frame. Some frames are more abstract, such as Change_position_on_a_scale, evoked by LUs such as decline, decrease, gain, plummet, rise, etc., with FEs such as Item, Attribute, Initial_value and Final_value.

In the simplest case, the frame-evoking LU is a verb and the FEs are its syntactic dependents:

[_Cook Matilde] fried [_Food the catfish] [_{Heating_instrument} in a heavy iron skillet]

The lexical entry for a predicating word, derived from such annotations, identifies the frame which underlies a given meaning and specifies the ways in which FEs are realized in structures headed by the word.

Many common nouns, such as artifacts like hat or tower, typically serve as dependents rather than clearly evoking their own frames. When we annotate such lexical units, the main purpose is to identify the most common predicates that govern phrases headed by them, and thus to illustrate the ways in which these common nouns function as FEs within frames evoked by the governing predicates.

We do recognize that artifact and natural kind nouns also have a minimal frame structure of their own. For example, artifacts often occur together with expressions indicating their sub-type, the material of which they are made, their manner of production, and their purpose/use; these are defined as FEs in the frames for various types of artifacts. However, the frames evoked by artifact and natural kind nouns rarely dominate the clauses in which they occur, and so we seldom select them as targets of annotation.

Formally, our annotations are constellations of triples that make up the frame element realization for each annotated sentence, each consisting of a frame element (for example, Food), a grammatical function (say, Object) and a phrase type (say, NP). We think of these three types of annotation on each tagged frame element as "layers" and they are displayed as such in the annotation software used in the project, but the grammatical function and phrase type layers are not displayed in the web-based report system, to avoid visual clutter. The full data, available as part of the data download (see [LINK] FNdata), includes these three layers (and several more not discussed here) for all of the annotated sentences, along with complete frame and FE descriptions, frame-frame relations, and lexical entries summarizing the valence patterns for each annotated LU.

Comparison with WordNet and ontologies

The FrameNet database is a lexical resource with unique characteristics that differentiate it from other resources such as commercially available dictionaries and thesauri and from the best-known lexical resource, WordNet.

• Like dictionary subentries, our lexical units come with definitions, either from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th Edition (courtesy of Oxford University Press) or a definition written by a FrameNet staff member.
• Unlike commercial dictionaries, we provide multiple annotated examples of each sense of a word (i.e. each lexical unit). Moreover, the set of examples (roughly 20 per LU) is meant to illustrate all of the combinatorial possibilities of the lexical unit.
• The examples we provide are attestations taken from naturalistic corpora rather than constructed by a linguist or lexicographer. The main FrameNet corpus is the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC), which is both large and balanced across genres (editorials, textbooks, advertisements, novels, sermons, etc.), but, of course, lacks many specifically American expressions. We are also using U.S. newswire texts provided by the Linguistic Data Consortium, and have recently acquired the newly released initial part of the American National Corpus, which we plan to begin using soon.
• Our analysis of the English lexicon proceeds frame by frame rather than by lemma, whereas traditional dictionary-making procedes word by word through the alphabet. Thus, while a traditional lexicographer measures progress in words completed, FrameNet measures progress in frames completed. The fact that there are one or more LUs for a given word in completed frames does not mean that there could not be other LUs for the same word in future frames.
• Each lexical unit is linked to a semantic frame, and hence to the other words which evoke that frame. This makes the FrameNet database similar to a thesaurus, grouping together semantically similar words.
• All ontologies and WordNet provide some sort of hierarchical relations between their nodes; likewise, FrameNet includes a network of relations between frames. Several types are defined, of which the most important are:
  • Inheritance: The child frame is a subtype of the parent frame, and each FE in the parent is bound to a corresponding FE in the child. (An IS-A relation.)
  • Using: The child frame presupposes the parent frame as background, e.g the Speed frame "uses" (or presupposes) the Motion frame; however, not all parent FEs need to be bound to child FEs.
  • Subframe: The child frame is a subevent of a complex event represented by the parent, e.g. the Criminal_process frame has subframes of Arrest, Arraignment, Trial, and Sentencing.
  These frame-frame relations are shown in the frame reports Frame Index ; the FE-FE relations are not shown. There is also a new graphical browser for them, the Frame Grapher
• Since we do not do much annotation of nouns denoting artifacts and natural kinds, the FrameNet database is not readily usable as an ontology of things. In this area, we mostly defer to WordNet, which provides extensive coverage, including hierarchical relations of areas such as animals, plants, etc.

What does "word" mean?

In this discussion, we have used the word word in talking about lexical units. The reality is actually rather complex. When we say that the word bake is polysemous, we mean that the lemma bake.v (which has the word-forms bake, bakes, baked, and baking) is linked to three different frames:

• Apply_heat: Michelle baked the potatoes for 45 minutes.
• Cooking_creation: Michelle baked her mother a cake for her birthday.
• Absorb_heat: The potatoes have to bake for more than 30 minutes.

For more detailed discussion on everything discussed here, please see the Book and the FAQs.