Transfer of frames from english framenet to construct Chinese framenet: A bilingual corpus-based approach

Current publicly available Chinese FrameNet has a relatively low coverage of frames and lexical units compared with FrameNet in other languages. Frames are incompletely specified for some lexical units, and some critical lexical elements are even missing. That results in suitable frames cannot be triggered and filled in practical applications. This paper presents an automatic approach to constructing Chinese FrameNet. We first capture the mapping between English lexical entries and their Chinese counterparts in a large scale sentence-aligned English-Chinese bilingual corpus. Then, a semantic transfer approach is proposed based on word alignments applied to a large balanced bilingual corpus. The resource currently covers 779 frames and 36k lexical units. We apply it to annotate diary and tweet, and achieve overall 86% success rate to provide frame recommendations that are acceptable by annotators. The success rates in terms of source types are 95% and 80% for diaries and tweets respectively.