Lexicon and Grammar in Bulgarian FrameNet

In this paper, we report on our attempt at assigning semantic information from the English FrameNet to lexical units in the Bulgarian valency lexicon. The paper briefly presents the model underlying the Bulgarian FrameNet (BulFrameNet): each lexical entry consists of a lexical unit; a semantic frame from the English FrameNet, expressing abstract semantic structure; a grammatical class, defining the inflexional paradigm; a valency frame describing (some of) the syntactic and lexical-semantic combinatory properties (an optional component); and (semantically and syntactically) annotated examples. The target is a corpus-based lexicon giving an exhaustive account of the semantic and syntactic combinatory properties of an extensive number of Bulgarian lexical units. The Bulgarian FrameNet database so far contains unique descriptions of over 3 000 Bulgarian lexical units, approx. one tenth of them aligned with appropriate semantic frames, supports XML import and export and will be accessible, i.e., displayed and queried via the web.