Towards a Linking of FrameNet and SUMO

Most end-user applications of natural language processing such as question answering or information retrieval – and especially a research-oriented task like textual entailment – need to process entailment and contradiction in one way or another. In order to detect entailment and contradiction, a system needs to access very different kinds of resources, such as lexicons, semantic word nets or knowledge ontologies. One such knowledge ontology is SUMO. SUMO represents upper-model knowledge in an abstract way, using a lisp-like format whose expressivity equals that of first-order logic. A direct connection between the syntactic level in the form of free or syntactically preprocessed text and the semantics in the form of SUMO does not exist. There is no obvious way to represent the information contained in a text or sentence using SUMO. This thesis is concerned with this syntax-semantics interface. We will propose an algorithm that combines FrameNet and SUMO. Methods and tools to achieve FrameNet annotations of a given sentence do exist already. Our combination algorithm is based on this FrameNet annotation and links frames to SUMO concepts and frame elements to SUMO relations.