This paper reports on the development of a French FrameNet, within the ASFALDA project. While the first phase of the project focused on the development of a French set of frames and corresponding lexicon (Candito et al., 2014), this paper concentrates on the subsequent corpus annotation phase, which focused on four notional domains (commercial transactions, cognitive stances, causality and verbal communication). Given full coverage is not reachable for a relatively “new” FrameNet project, we advocate that focusing on specific notional domains allowed us to obtain full lexical coverage for the frames of these domains, while partially reflecting word sense ambiguities. Furthermore, as frames and roles were annotated on two French Treebanks (the French Treebank (Abeillé and Barrier, 2004) and the Sequoia Treebank (Candito and Seddah, 2012), we were able to extract a syntactico-semantic lexicon from the annotated frames. In the resource’s current status, there are 98 frames, 662 frame evoking words, 872 senses, and about 13000 annotated frames, with their semantic roles assigned to portions of text. The French FrameNet is freely available at alpage.inria.fr/asfalda.

We present here a general set of semantic frames to annotate causal expressions, with a rich lexicon in French and an annotated corpus of about 5000 instances of causal lexical items with their corresponding semantic frames. The aim of our project is to have both the largest possible coverage of causal phenomena in French, across all parts of speech, and have it linked to a general semantic framework such as FN, to benefit in particular from the relations between other semantic frames, e.g., temporal ones or intentional ones, and the underlying upper lexical ontology that enable some forms of reasoning. This is part of the larger ASFALDA French FrameNet project, which focuses on a few different notional domains which are interesting in their own right (Djemma et al., 2016), including cognitive positions and communication frames. In the process of building the French lexicon and preparing the annotation of the corpus, we had to remodel some of the frames proposed in FN based on English data, with hopefully more precise frame definitions to facilitate human annotation. This includes semantic clarifications of frames and frame elements, redundancy elimination, and added coverage. The result is arguably a significant improvement of the treatment of causality in FN itself.

The Asfalda project aims to develop a French corpus with frame-based semantic annotations and automatic tools for shallow semantic analysis. We present the first part of the project: focusing on a set of notional domains, we delimited a subset of English frames, adapted them to French data when necessary, and developed the corresponding French lexicon. We believe that working domain by domain helped us to enforce the coherence of the resulting resource, and also has the advantage that, though the number of frames is limited (around a hundred), we obtain full coverage within a given domain.

This paper reports on research activities on automatic methods for the enrichment of the Senso Comune platform. At this stage of development, we will report on two tasks, namely word sense alignment with MultiWordNet and automatic acquisition of Verb Shallow Frames from sense annotated data in the MultiSemCor corpus. The results obtained are satisfying. We achieved a final F-measure of 0.64 for noun sense alignment and a F-measure of 0.47 for verb sense alignment, and an accuracy of 68% on the acquisition of Verb Shallow Frames.

This paper describes the ANNODIS resource, a discourse-level annotated corpus for French. The corpus combines two perspectives on discourse: a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. The bottom-up view incrementally builds a structure from elementary discourse units, while the top-down view focuses on the selective annotation of multi-level discourse structures. The corpus is composed of texts that are diversified with respect to genre, length and type of discursive organisation. The methodology followed here involves an iterative design of annotation guidelines in order to reach satisfactory inter-annotator agreement levels. This allows us to raise a few issues relevant for the comparison of such complex objects as discourse structures. The corpus also serves as a source of empirical evidence for discourse theories. We present here two first analyses taking advantage of this new annotated corpus --one that tested hypotheses on constraints governing discourse structure, and another that studied the variations in composition and signalling of multi-level discourse structures.

This paper focuses on the improvement of the conceptual structure of FrameNet (FN) for the sake of applying this resource to knowledge-intensive NLP tasks requiring reasoning, such as question answering, information extraction etc. In this paper we show that in addition to coverage incompleteness, the current version of FN suffers from conceptual inconsistency and lacks axiomatization which can prevent appropriate inferences. For the sake of discovering and classifying conceptual problems in FN we investigate the FrameNet-Annotated corpus for Textual Entailment. Then we propose a methodology for improving the conceptual organization of FN. The main issue we focus on in our study is enriching, axiomatizing and cleaning up frame relations. Our methodology includes a data-driven analysis of frames resulting in discovering new frame relations and an ontological analysis of frames and frame relations resulting in axiomatizing relations and formulating constraints on them. In this paper, frames and frame relations are analyzed in terms of the DOLCE formal ontology. Additionally, we have described a case study aiming at demonstrating how the proposed methodology works in practice as well as investigating the impact of the restructured and axiomatized frame relations on recognizing textual entailment.

Le projet ANNODIS vise la construction d’un corpus de textes annotés au niveau discursif ainsi que le développement d’outils pour l’annotation et l’exploitation de corpus. Les annotations adoptent deux points de vue complémentaires : une perspective ascendante part d’unités de discours minimales pour construire des structures complexes via un jeu de relations de discours ; une perspective descendante aborde le texte dans son entier et se base sur des indices pré-identifiés pour détecter des structures discursives de haut niveau. La construction du corpus est associée à la création de deux interfaces : la première assiste l’annotation manuelle des relations et structures discursives en permettant une visualisation du marquage issu des prétraitements ; une seconde sera destinée à l’exploitation des annotations. Nous présentons les modèles et protocoles d’annotation élaborés pour mettre en oeuvre, au travers de l’interface dédiée, la campagne d’annotation.