---
title: "Combining Word Sense and Usage for Modeling Frame — Cao 2008"
description: "FrameNet's limited lexical coverage and weak multilingual support constrain its use in tasks such as question answering and textual entailment."
authors: ["Diego De Cao", "Danilo Croce", "Marco Pennacchiotti", "Roberto Basili"]
year: 2008
venue: "Semantics in Text Processing. STEP 2008 Conference Proceedings"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W08-2208/"
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/papers/cao-2008-combining-word-sense-usage-modeling/"
---
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# Combining Word Sense and Usage for Modeling Frame Semantics

**Authors:** [Diego De Cao](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/diego-de-cao/), [Danilo Croce](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/danilo-croce/), [Marco Pennacchiotti](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/marco-pennacchiotti/), [Roberto Basili](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/roberto-basili/) · **Year:** 2008 · **Venue:** Semantics in Text Processing. STEP 2008 Conference Proceedings · **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/W08-2208/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W08-2208.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2082599510)

**Citations:** 31 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [19](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
FrameNet's limited lexical coverage and weak multilingual support constrain its use in tasks such as question answering and textual entailment. The authors propose a computational model of FrameNet that represents frames and lexical units (LUs) so that similarity between them can be measured. The model combines two sources of evidence. The paradigmatic component maps each frame onto sub-hierarchies of WordNet, using conceptual density for nouns, co-hyponymy for verbs and synonymy for adjectives. The distributional component places frames and LUs as co-occurrence vectors in a corpus-derived semantic space. The combined model supports three tasks: assigning unknown LUs to frames, reducing LU polysemy by linking LUs to WordNet synsets, and transferring English LUs to Italian via MultiWordNet. Merging the two kinds of evidence outperforms either one used alone for LU induction in both English and Italian. The Italian experiment yielded about 15,000 automatically generated LUs, offering a practical basis for building an Italian FrameNet and for assisting lexicographers in other languages.

## Key points
- **Paradigmatic model.** Each frame receives a separate "WordNet model" for each part of speech, built on WordNet 2.0. For nouns, a greedy conceptual-density algorithm selects the synsets that best generalize the frame's LUs.
- **Three tasks.** The framework is applied to:
  - inducing LUs that FrameNet does not yet contain,
  - disambiguating LUs against WordNet senses,
  - porting LUs from English to Italian.
- **Italian manual validation, frequent words.** On 1,500 word–frame decisions covering 776 words, accuracy was 0.79 with 93.0% coverage.
- **Italian manual validation, rarer words.** For words occurring 100–200 times in the corpus (558 pairs, 357 words), accuracy rose to 0.87 with 94.3% coverage.
- **Comparison with a manual oracle.** The oracle contained 527 pairs, of which 437 were represented in MultiWordNet. The system produced 317 correct guesses, giving Precision 0.87 and Recall 0.72. Many of the remaining predictions were plausible new entries, such as dialectal, jargon or technical words.

*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/shelves/linguistics/)

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

## Cited by

Cited by

19 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 5 of them have a page here, 14 not yet.

- [Aligning FrameNet and WordNet based on Semantic Neighborhoods](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/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/papers/hartmann-2013-framenet-way-babel-creating-bilingual/)
- [Integrating WordNet and FrameNet using a Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/laparra-2009-integrating-wordnet-framenet-knowledge-based/)
- [Evaluating FrameNet-style semantic parsing: the role of coverage gaps in FrameNet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/palmer-2010-evaluating-framenet-style-semantic-parsing/)
- [New Features for FrameNet - WordNet Mapping](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/tonelli-2009-new-features-framenet-wordnet-mapping/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{cao2008combining,
  title = {{Combining Word Sense and Usage for Modeling Frame Semantics}},
  author = {Cao, Diego De and Croce, Danilo and Pennacchiotti, Marco and Basili, Roberto},
  booktitle = {Semantics in Text Processing. STEP 2008 Conference Proceedings},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.3115/1626481.1626489},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1626481.1626489}
}
```

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## References

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