The Berkeley FrameNet Project (BFN, https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/) created descriptions of 73 “non-core” grammatical constructions, annotation of 50 of these constructions and about 1500 example sentences in its one year project “Beyond the Core: A Pilot Project on Cataloging Grammatical Constructions and Multiword Expressions in English” supported by the National Science Foundation. The project did not aim at building a full-fledged Construction Grammar, but the registry of English constructions created by this project, which is called Constructicon, provides a representative sample of the current coverage of English constructions (Lee-Goldman & Rhodes 2009). CxN Viewer is a search tool which I have developed for Constructicon and the tool shows its typical English constructions on the web browser. CxN Viewer is a web application consisting of HTML files and JavaScript codes. The tool is a useful program that will benefit researchers working with the data annotated within the framework of BFN. CxN Viewer is a unicode-compliant application, and it can deal with constructions of other languages such as Spanish.

FrameSQL is a web-based application which the author (Sato, 2003; Sato 2008) created originally for searching the Berkeley FrameNet lexical database. FrameSQL now can handle the Japanese lexical database built by the Japanese FrameNet project (JFN) of Keio University in Japan. FrameSQL can search and view the JFN data released in March of 2009 on a standard web browser. Users do not need to install any additional software tools to use FrameSQL, nor do they even need to download the JFN data to their local computer, because FrameSQL accesses the database of the server computer, and executes searches. FrameSQL not only shows a clear view of the headword’s grammar and combinatorial properties of the database, but also relates a Japanese word with its counterparts in English. FrameSQL puts together the Japanese and English lexical databases, and the user can access them seamlessly, as if they were a unified database. Mutual hyperlinks among these databases and the bilingual search mode make it easy to compare semantic structures of corresponding lexical units between these languages, and it could be useful for building multilingual lexical resources.

The Berkeley FrameNet Project (BFN) is making an English lexical database called FrameNet, which describes syntactic and semantic properties of an English lexicon extracted from large electronic text corpora (Baker et al., 1998). Other projects dealing with Spanish, German and Japanese follow a similar approach and annotate large corpora. FrameSQL is a web-based application developed by the author, and it allows the user to search the BFN database in a variety of ways (Sato, 2003). FrameSQL shows a clear view of the headword’s grammar and combinatorial properties offered by the FrameNet database. FrameSQL has been developing and new functions were implemented for processing the Spanish FrameNet data (Subirats and Sato, 2004). FrameSQL is also in the process of incorporating the data of the Japanese FrameNet Project (Ohara et al., 2003) and that of the Saarbrücken Lexical Semantics Acquisition Project (Erk et al., 2003) into the database and will offer the same user-interface for searching these lexical data. This paper describes new functions of FrameSQL, showing how FrameSQL deals with the lexical data of English, Spanish, Japanese and German seamlessly.