FrameBench: A Language Understanding Benchmark Based on Frame Semantics

Chihiro Yano, Ryohei Sasano


Abstract
In frame semantics, sentence comprehension is assumed to proceed by relating lexical meaning to background knowledge called semantic frames, thereby enabling readers to implicitly enrich the text with unstated information. Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of downstream tasks; however, it remains unclear whether they can reproduce the kinds of implicit enrichment that humans naturally make during comprehension. To address this question, we introduce FrameBench, a benchmark grounded in frame semantics. FrameBench consists of multiple-choice questions that test whether models distinguish the frames evoked by the same verb across contexts. We construct the benchmark for English and Japanese using FrameNet-style resources and a generation-and-verification pipeline with native-speaker judgments. Our experiments on a diverse set of models reveal challenges for small models, while several large models surpass the human reference scores. We release the constructed FrameBench dataset and the code for dataset construction and evaluation at https://github.com/SasanoLab/FrameBench
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2012
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
42819–42833
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2012/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chihiro Yano and Ryohei Sasano. 2026. FrameBench: A Language Understanding Benchmark Based on Frame Semantics. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 42819–42833, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FrameBench: A Language Understanding Benchmark Based on Frame Semantics (Yano & Sasano, Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2012.pdf