Introduction
Superframes is a scheme for frame-semantic annotation of text. Every predicate is assigned a frame, and every argument is assigned a unique role. Superframes annotations can help search corpora for phenomena of interest, enable quantitative cross-lingual comparisons, and support semantic parsing. Superframes aims to be easy to annotate. In particular,
- Superframes does not require a lexicon. Frames are coarse and small enough in number to learn them by heart.
- Superframes is language-independent.
- Superframes ia annotated atop Universal Dependencies, thus delegating many difficult syntax-related decisions to an established framework.
Superframes defines a taxonomy of frames, each of which denotes a relation between two entities and thus defines two roles. Annotating a text comes down to assigning frame labels to content words and role labels to UD dependency edges between them.
Annotating Static Verbs
Consider the following sentence (relevant UD edges shown):
Here, we say that the (verbal) predicate owns evokes the POSSESSION frame,
which defines the possessum and possessor roles. The possessum roles is
filled by a house and the possessor roles is filled by Kim. So we
annotate as follows:
We call the arguments that fill the predicate’s frame’s roles the core arguments. We will turn to non-core arguments later.
Note that semantic roles abstract away from syntactic alternation. As an example, consider the following passive sentences and its Superframes annotation:
Note also that there are only a few dozen superframes, so the meaning they specify is necessarily coarse. Different predicates with similar meaning can invoke the same superframe.
Verbs with One Argument
There are, of course, also predicates with only one argument, in which case only one of the two roles is used (most often the first one).
INTERNAL-STATE is one of those superframes whose second role state is
rarely filled by an argument. It denotes an abstract entity that is already
expressed by the predicate.
Verbs with Zero Arguments
It also happens that predicates occur with no core arguments. One example is
weather verbs such as rain. For consistency, there is a rule that says
predicates with no core roles must always be annotated with the most general
superframe ENTITY. So that is what happens for example for weather verbs such
as rain (which has a syntactic, but semantically empty argument):
We will turn to what NONCOMP means later.
Annotating Dynamic Verbs
Many verbs denote not a state but an event. Often, this event can be framed in
terms of the initiation, deinitiation, continuation, or prevention of a
state. In these cases, we combine the frame label for the state with one of
-INIT, -NEG-INIT, -NEG-INIT-NEG, or -INIT-NEG.
Other events cannot as easily be expressed in terms of a state. We give them
the very general frame SITUATION combined with -DYN (dynamic).
Further Examples
