*** ROMANCE FrameNet ***

Kick-off Meeting held as part of the Eurolan 2005 Summer School

25 July - 6 August, 2005,
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
 

Call for Interest

The ROMANCE FrameNet Consortium is a joint initiative to create a special interest group with the goal of building a multi-lingual FrameNet resource for romance languages based on Fillmore's (1977, 1982) Frame Semantics.

ROMANCE FrameNet is different from multi-lingual WordNet since it will link collocational and constructional material to word senses (more than just sub-categorization frames for verbs). Applications to foreign language learning are apparent, as well as for computer assisted translation and multi-lingual information extraction.

We consider the major romance languages, namely:

French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan.

We propose to adopt a new methodology for the development of ROMANCE FrameNet by manually translating the sentences annotated by the original FrameNet project from the support corpora (e.g. BNC). This approach is inspired by the recent work on MultiSemCor. The translation task will be distributed among the participants and supervised by local teams in the participating institutions working on the different languages.

ROMANCE FrameNet will achieve the following goals:

1. create a consistent aligned and frame-annotated multi-lingual corpus;
2. highlight cross-language regularities, and structural intra- and extra-typological idiosyncrasies;
3. create a semantically indexed translation memory and an inverse multi-lingual dictionary;
4. create one of the first freely available resource which contains cross-languages sub-categorization and collocational mappings;
5. reuse the work done on automatic role assignment and semantic parsing (cfr. Senseval-3).

We propose to meet during the EUROLAN 2005 Summer School in Cluj-Napoca in order to develop an informal agreement on a work plan for bootstrapping the targeted resource.

As a first action for bootstrapping the project, we propose the translation and annotation of a common subset of 100 sentences from the English FrameNet data in each of the targeted languages. The burden of this work might be taken by the participants to the kick-off meeting, noting that there may be multiple translations for the same sentence. We consider this redundancy very useful for evaluating inter-translator agreement. This mini-corpus will be the basis of the discussion during the kick-off meetings.
 
The format of the kick-off meeting at EUROLAN will be spontaneous informal gatherings and working groups among the participants (likely within the same language) during day-long meetings and a 1.5 hours public presentation and discussion for each of the days.

We invite all the interested people and institutions that will play a major role in the support and development of ROMANCE FrameNet to submit a statement of intention to join the consortium, including at least:

• a statement of interest to the initiative;
  
• an estimate of the resources available for the bootstrapping initiative (how many sentences willing to translate and in which languages);
• the intention of participating to the EUROLAN kick-off meeting (and hopefully to the whole summer school).

It will be possible to participate in the ROMANCE FrameNet initiative without attending the kick-off meeting by providing the translations of the sentences. We will appreciate this type of contribution.

Update March 16th 2005