---
title: "Integrating WordNet and FrameNet using a — Laparra 2009"
description: "FrameNet offers rich frame-semantic descriptions, but its coverage is small: about 10,000 lexical units (LUs), compared with more than 150,000 words in…"
authors: ["Egoitz Laparra", "German Rigau"]
year: 2009
venue: "Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/R09-1039/"
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/laparra-2009-integrating-wordnet-framenet-knowledge-based/"
---
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# Integrating WordNet and FrameNet using a Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm

**Authors:** [Egoitz Laparra](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/egoitz-laparra/), [German Rigau](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/german-rigau/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009 · **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/R09-1039/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/R09-1039.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2133465498)

**Citations:** 23 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [7](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
FrameNet offers rich frame-semantic descriptions, but its coverage is small: about 10,000 lexical units (LUs), compared with more than 150,000 words in WordNet. Laparra and Rigau partially align the two resources by linking each FrameNet LU to a WordNet synset. They treat the LUs of a frame as a coherent group of words and disambiguate them together with SSI-Dijkstra. This knowledge-based, graph-driven WSD method repeatedly selects the sense that is closest, by shortest-path distance, to the senses already interpreted. The graph is built from WordNet and eXtended WordNet. Because the original algorithm needs monosemous words as a starting point, it fails on frames that contain only polysemous LUs. The authors therefore design four variants (FSI, ASI, FSP, ASP) that begin from an initial sense guess. The variants outperform both the most-frequent-sense baseline and plain SSI-Dijkstra. The resulting mapping can expand FrameNet's coverage, add frame information to WordNet, and transfer frames to other languages through aligned wordnets.

## Key points
- The knowledge graph contains 99,635 synset nodes and 636,077 edges. It combines WordNet 1.6 relations with eXtended WordNet relations, which were mapped to version 1.6 using automatic WN Mappings.
- Of the FrameNet LUs, 9,360 (spread over 708 frames) are found in WordNet. About 190 frames (roughly 26%) contain only polysemous LUs, and basic SSI-Dijkstra produces no output for these.
- On the 195 frames with at least 10 LUs, overall F1 is 0.69 for the WN most-frequent-sense baseline, 0.75 for SSI-Dijkstra, and 0.76 for FSI and ASI. FSI and ASI reach 0.85 on nouns, while FSP does best on verbs with 0.67.
- On frames with only polysemous LUs, the best overall F1 is 0.55 (ASI), against 0.54 for the baseline.
- Results appear close to the P/R/F of 0.80/0.79/0.80 reported in earlier work on four frames, although the setups differ. The mapping is released as WordFrameNet. Planned work includes a hybrid approach that applies FSP to verbs while relying on FSI for nouns and adjectives, a comparison with UKB, and mapping frame elements.

*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: [Word sense disambiguation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/word-sense-disambiguation/) · [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cited by

Cited by

7 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

- [Aligning FrameNet and WordNet based on Semantic Neighborhoods](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ferrandez-2010-aligning-framenet-wordnet-based-semantic/)
- [FrameNet on the Way to Babel: Creating a Bilingual FrameNet Using Wiktionary as Interlingual Connection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hartmann-2013-framenet-way-babel-creating-bilingual/)
- [eXtended WordFrameNet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/laparra-2010-extended-wordframenet/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{laparra2009integrating,
  title = {{Integrating WordNet and FrameNet using a Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm}},
  author = {Laparra, Egoitz and Rigau, German},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference RANLP-2009},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/R09-1039/}
}
```

- [← previous Inferring Shallow-Transfer Machine Translation Rules from Small Parallel Corpora](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sanchez-2014-martinez-inferring-shallow-transfer-machine-translation/)
- [next → Joshua: An Open Source Toolkit for Parsing-Based Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/li-2009-joshua-open-source-toolkit-parsing/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/)

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