Arthur Lorenzi


2026

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a major public health issue, with the World Health Organization estimating that one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime. In Brazil, although healthcare professionals are legally required to report such cases, underreporting remains significant due to difficulties in identifying abuse and limited integration between public information systems. This study investigates whether FrameNet-based semantic annotation of open-text fields in electronic medical records can support the identification of patterns of GBV. We compare the performance of an SVM classifier for GBV cases trained on (1) frame-annotated text, (2) annotated text combined with parameterized data, and (3) parameterized data alone. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that models incorporating semantic annotation outperform categorical models, achieving over 0.3 improvement in F1 score and demonstrating that domain-specific semantic representations provide meaningful signals beyond structured demographic data. The findings support the hypothesis that semantic analysis of clinical narratives can enhance early identification strategies and support more informed public health interventions.

2025

This paper presents a multimodal semantic analysis of accessible Brazilian short films using a frame-based annotation approach. We introduce a subset of the Audition dataset, comprising six short films from the animation and documentary genres. We analysed three communicative modes: original audio, audio description, and visual content. Trained annotators semantically annotated each mode following the FrameNet Brazil multimodal methodology. To compare meaning across modalities, we used cosine similarity over frame-semantic representations. Results show that audio description aligns more closely with video content than original audio, reflecting its role in translating visual meaning into language. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of frame semantics in modelling meaning across modalities and provide quantitative evidence of audio description as a bridge between visual and verbal communication. The dataset and annotation strategies are a valuable resource for research on multimodal representation, semantic similarity, and accessible media.

2024

This paper presents MoCCA, a Model of Comparative Concepts for Aligning Constructicons under development by a consortium of research groups building Constructicons of different languages including Brazilian Portuguese, English, German and Swedish. The Constructicons will be aligned by using comparative concepts (CCs) providing language-neutral definitions of linguistic properties. The CCs are drawn from typological research on grammatical categories and constructions, and from FrameNet frames, organized in a conceptual network. Language-specific constructions are linked to the CCs in accordance with general principles. MoCCA is organized into files of two types: a largely static CC Database file and multiple Linking files containing relations between constructions in a Constructicon and the CCs. Tools are planned to facilitate visualization of the CC network and linking of constructions to the CCs. All files and guidelines will be versioned, and a mechanism is set up to report cases where a language-specific construction cannot be easily linked to existing CCs.
This paper presents Framed Multi30K (FM30K), a novel frame-based Brazilian Portuguese multimodal-multilingual dataset which i) extends the Multi30K dataset (Elliot et al., 2016) with 158,915 original Brazilian Portuguese descriptions, and 30,104 Brazilian Portuguese translations from original English descriptions; and ii) adds 2,677,613 frame evocation labels to the 158,915 English descriptions and to the ones created for Brazilian Portuguese; (iii) extends the Flickr30k Entities dataset (Plummer et al., 2015) with 190,608 frames and Frame Elements correlations with the existing phrase-to-region correlations.
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements—for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders—are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a ‘UCxn’ annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.

2023

This paper reports on negative results in a task of automatic identification of schematic clausal constructions and their elements in Brazilian Portuguese. The experiment was set up so as to test whether form and meaning properties of constructions, modeled in terms of Universal Dependencies and FrameNet Frames in a Constructicon, would improve the performance of transformer models in the task. Qualitative analysis of the results indicate that alternatives to the linearization of those properties, dataset size and a post-processing module should be explored in the future as a means to make use of information in Constructicons for NLP tasks.

2022

Despite advances in statistical approaches to the modeling of meaning, many ques- tions about the ideal way of exploiting both knowledge-based (e.g., FrameNet, WordNet) and data-based methods (e.g., BERT) remain unresolved. This workshop focuses on these questions with three session papers that run the gamut from highly distributional methods (Lekkas et al., 2022), to highly curated methods (Gamonal, 2022), and techniques with statistical methods producing structured semantics (Lawley and Schubert, 2022). In addition, we begin the workshop with a small comparison of cross-lingual techniques for frame semantic alignment for one language pair (Spanish and English). None of the distributional techniques consistently aligns the 1-best frame match from English to Spanish, all failing in at least one case. Predicting which techniques will align which frames cross-linguistically is not possible from any known characteristic of the alignment technique or the frames. Although distributional techniques are a rich source of semantic information for many tasks, at present curated, knowledge-based semantics remains the only technique that can consistently align frames across languages.
This paper presents Lutma, a collaborative, semi-constrained, tutorial-based tool for contributing frames and lexical units to the Global FrameNet initiative. The tool parameterizes the process of frame creation, avoiding consistency violations and promoting the integration of frames contributed by the community with existing frames. Lutma is structured in a wizard-like fashion so as to provide users with text and video tutorials relevant for each step in the frame creation process. We argue that this tool will allow for a sensible expansion of FrameNet coverage in terms of both languages and cultural perspectives encoded by them, positioning frames as a viable alternative for representing perspective in language models.
This paper argues in favor of the adoption of annotation practices for multimodal datasets that recognize and represent the inherently perspectivized nature of multimodal communication. To support our claim, we present a set of annotation experiments in which FrameNet annotation is applied to the Multi30k and the Flickr 30k Entities datasets. We assess the cosine similarity between the semantic representations derived from the annotation of both pictures and captions for frames. Our findings indicate that: (i) frame semantic similarity between captions of the same picture produced in different languages is sensitive to whether the caption is a translation of another caption or not, and (ii) picture annotation for semantic frames is sensitive to whether the image is annotated in presence of a caption or not.

2020

The FrameNet (FN) project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (ICSI), which documents the core vocabulary of contemporary English, was the first lexical resource based on Fillmore’s theory of Frame Semantics. Berkeley FrameNet has inspired related projects in roughly a dozen other languages, which have evolved somewhat independently; the current Multilingual FrameNet project (MLFN) is an attempt to find alignments between all of them. The alignment problem is complicated by the fact that these projects have adhered to the Berkeley FrameNet model to varying degrees, and they were also founded at different times, when different versions of the Berkeley FrameNet data were available. We describe several new methods for finding relations of similarity between semantic frames across languages. We will demonstrate ViToXF, a new tool which provides interactive visualizations of these cross-lingual relations, between frames, lexical units, and frame elements, based on resources such as multilingual dictionaries and on shared distributional vector spaces, making clear the strengths and weaknesses of different alignment methods.
Search
Fix author