A Bilingual Electronic Dictionary for Frame Semantics

Frame semantics is a linguistic theory which is currently gaining ground. The creation of lexical entries for a large number of words presupposes the development of complex lexical acquisition techniques in order to identify the vocabulary for describing the elements of a 'frame'. In this paper, we show how a lexical-semantic database compiled on the basis of a bilingual (English-French) dictionary can be used to identify some general frame elements which are relevant in a frame-semantic approach such as the one adopted in the FrameNet project (Fillmore & Atkins 1998, Gahl 1998). The database has been systematically enriched with explicit lexical-semantic relations holding between some elements of the microstructure of the dictionary entries. The manifold relationships have been labelled in terms of lexical functions, based on Mel'cuk's notion of co-occurrence and lexical-semantic relations in Meaning-Text Theory (Mel'cuk et al. 1984). We show how these lexical functions can be used and refined to extract potential realizations of frame elements such as typical instruments or typical locatives, which are believed to be recurrent elements in a large number of frames. We also show how the database organization of the computational lexicon makes it possible to readily access implicit and translationally-relevant combinatorial information.