Obtaining Japanese Lexical Units for Semantic Frames from Berkeley FrameNet Using a Bilingual Corpus

An attempt was made to semi-automatically obtain “lexical units” (LUs) for Japanese from the English LUs defined in the semantic frame database provided by Berkeley FrameNet (BFN) using an English-Japanese bilingual corpus. This task was a prerequisite to building a complete database of semantic frames for Japanese. In the task, a Japanese word is first translated into an English word or phrase, E. E is one of the lexical units that evoked a particular semantic frame, F , in the BFN database. When other lexical units of F are translated back into Japanese, this defines a candidate set of F for the lexical units of F in Japanese. The viability of the proposed method was tested on a Japanese verb (X-ga Y -wo) osou (roughly meaning “X attack(s) Y ,” “X hit(s) Y ,” “X surprise(s) Y ” in English, showing that it is a relatively polysemous word). The resulting translation was compared to semantic descriptions provided by IPAL and Nihongo Goi-Taikei (A Japanese Lexicon), two well-known language resources for Japanese, and also by the Frame Oriented Concept Analysis of Language (FOCAL). The comparison revealed that FOCAL, BFN, Goi Taikei, and IPAL provided finer-grained descriptions in this specific order.