---
title: "Semantic Role Labeling with the Swedish — Johansson 2012"
description: "This paper reports the first semantic role labeling (SRL) experiments built on the Swedish FrameNet (SweFN), a frame-semantic lexicon still under…"
authors: ["Richard Johansson", "Karin Friberg Heppin", "Dimitrios Kokkinakis"]
year: 2012
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L12-1241/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/johansson-2012-semantic-role-labeling-swedish-framenet/"
---
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# Semantic Role Labeling with the Swedish FrameNet

**Authors:** [Richard Johansson](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/richard-johansson/), [Karin Friberg Heppin](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/karin-friberg-heppin/), Dimitrios Kokkinakis · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1241/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1241.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251195394)

**Citations:** 15 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · 9 in our library, of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
This paper reports the first semantic role labeling (SRL) experiments built on the Swedish FrameNet (SweFN), a frame-semantic lexicon still under construction. SweFN mirrors the Berkeley FrameNet and draws its lexical units from SALDO. Its annotated example sentences provide only a small training set. The authors build a two-step pipeline on top of dependency trees from the LTH parser, which was trained on a Swedish treebank. A linear SVM first decides which tree nodes form argument spans, and an online-trained multiclass classifier then assigns frame element labels. Features are chosen by greedy forward selection. Experiments cover cross-validation over sentences and over frames, a comparison of parsers, cross-frame sharing of role labels, Brown cluster features, and a medical-domain test set. Accuracy is limited by the scarce data, but sharing labels and adding clusters both help. The argument segmenter holds up well on frames it has never seen. This makes the system a plausible aid for lexicographers who annotate new frames semi-automatically.

## Key points
- **Resource:** As of October 2011, SweFN had 519 frames, about 18,000 lexical units from SALDO, and 2,974 example sentences, which served as the training data.
- **Main results (5-fold CV over sentences):**
  - Segmentation reached P 70.6 / R 64.8.
  - Labeling accuracy was 64.3, against a most-frequent-label baseline of 30.4.
  - Core roles scored 71.9 and non-core roles 47.2.
- **Robustness to new frames and domains:**
  - On unseen frames, segmentation barely changed (P 70.6 / R 63.9), while labeling fell to 49.4.
  - Using frame-specific labels instead of shared ones lowered accuracy to 52.5.
  - Brown cluster features raised labeling accuracy from 64.3 to 65.0.
- **Parser choice:** Replacing the LTH parser with MaltParser reduced results to P 64.2 / R 54.0 and labeling accuracy 61.2, showing that parse quality matters a great deal.
- **Medical domain:** On 211 manually annotated sentences, the system scored P 67.3 / R 61.1 and accuracy 52.6, indicating a need for domain adaptation. Feature selection favored structural features for segmentation and lexical-plus-structural features for labeling.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{johansson2012semantic,
  title = {{Semantic Role Labeling with the Swedish FrameNet}},
  author = {Johansson, Richard and Heppin, Karin Friberg and Kokkinakis, Dimitrios},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.63317/2np8hazov8rt},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2np8hazov8rt}
}
```

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## References

20 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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