--- title: "The FrameNet Database and Software Tools — Fillmore 2002" description: "FrameNet tackles the absence of an English lexicon that ties word senses to the ways their semantic participants show up in syntax." authors: ["Charles J. Fillmore", "Collin F. Baker", "Hiroaki Sato"] year: 2002 venue: "Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/L02-1140/" 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/fillmore-2002-framenet-database-software-tools/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/fillmore-2002-framenet-database-software-tools/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2002](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2002/) / The FrameNet Database and Software Tools # The FrameNet Database and Software Tools **Authors:** [Charles J. Fillmore](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/charles-j-fillmore/), [Collin F. Baker](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/collin-f-baker/), Hiroaki Sato · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02) · **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/L02-1140/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1140.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1580356017) **Citations:** 81 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [26](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary FrameNet tackles the absence of an English lexicon that ties word senses to the ways their semantic participants show up in syntax. Based on Frame Semantics, it treats each lexical unit (a lemma paired with one sense) as evoking a frame, a conventionalized scene whose participants are frame elements (FEs). It then records how those FEs surface as phrase types and grammatical functions. Instead of annotating running text, lexicographers pick corpus sentences from the BNC and LDC news data that cover the full range of a word's combinatory patterns. They also mark core FEs that are left unexpressed. This demo paper presents the resulting database and the in-house toolchain: a Java frame editor and annotation GUI built on MySQL, web reports, the FrameSQL search interface, and a rule-based FE pre-labeler. The pre-labeler is to be compared with Gildea's learned role labeler. The data, roughly 300 frames and 5,000 lexical units, are distributed as XML. The resource matters because it gives lexicographers and NLP systems corpus-attested semantic-role data, for example for automatic semantic role labeling. ## Key points - Database scale: about 300 semantic frames and roughly 5,000 lexical units, with over 20 annotated corpus examples per lexical unit on average. Frames are linked by inheritance (ISA) and composition (PART-OF). - Corpora: BNC and LDC English newswire, with plans to add the American National Corpus. Corpus Workbench (IMS Stuttgart) handles search and subcorpus creation. Phase-one annotation used MITRE's Alembic Workbench, later replaced by a custom Java GUI over MySQL. - Omitted core FEs fall into three types: constructional (e.g., imperative subjects), existential (e.g., unstated objects of *eat*, *bake*) and anaphoric (recoverable from discourse). - Multi-layer annotation supports overlapping FE labels, mismatches between syntactic and semantic constituents, and several targets per sentence. A new XML format reflects this, and RDF via DAML+OIL is being added. - FrameSQL (Hiroaki Sato, Senshu University) supports searches by frame, lemma, FE, phrase type, grammatical function and head noun. A cascaded rule filter (e.g., valence patterns for *tell*) pre-labels FEs so annotators mostly approve or correct its output. *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: [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/semantic-role-labeling/) ## Cited by Cited by 26 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 5 of them have a page here, 21 not yet. - [Multi-Sentence Argument Linking](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ebner-2020-multi-sentence-argument-linking/) - [Outsourcing FrameNet to the Crowd](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/fossati-2013-outsourcing-framenet-crowd/) - [The Hebrew FrameNet Project](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/frame-2016-hayoun-hebrew-framenet-project/) - [Sentence Level Discourse Parsing using Syntactic and Lexical Information](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/soricut-2003-sentence-level-discourse-parsing-syntactic/) - [Recent Advances in Natural Language Inference: A Survey of Benchmarks, Resources, and Approaches](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/storks-2019-recent-advances-natural-language-inference/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{fillmore2002framenet, title = {{The FrameNet Database and Software Tools}}, author = {Fillmore, Charles J. and Baker, Collin F. and Sato, Hiroaki}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)}, year = {2002}, doi = {10.63317/42tfhpzywopx}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/42tfhpzywopx} } ``` - [← previous The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/huddleston-2002-cambridge-grammar-english-language/) - [next → The LinGO Redwoods Treebank: Motivation and Preliminary Applications](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bank-2002-oepen-lingo-redwoods-treebank-motivation-preliminary/) - [↑ back to papers of 2002](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2002/) ## References 7 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Collin F. Baker, Charles J. Fillmore, and John B. Lowe. 1998. The berkeley framenet project. In COLING-ACL ’98: Proceedings of the Conference, pages 86–90, Montréal. Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Collin+F%2E+Baker%2C+Charles+J%2E+Fillmore%2C+and+John+B%2E+Lowe%2E+1998%2E+The+berkeley+framenet+project%2E+In+COLING%2DACL+%E2%80%9998%3A+Proceedings+of+the+Conference%2C+pages+86%E2%80%9390%2C+Montre%CC%81al%2E+Association+for+Computational+Lin) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lex-1998-baker-berkeley-framenet/) 2. Charles J. Fillmore and Collin F. Baker. 2001. Frame semantics for text understanding. In Proceedings of Word-Net and Other Lexical Resources Workshop, pages 59– 64, Pittsburgh, June. NAACL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Charles+J%2E+Fillmore+and+Collin+F%2E+Baker%2E+2001%2E+Frame+semantics+for+text+understanding%2E+In+Proceedings+of+Word%2DNet+and+Other+Lexical+Resources+Workshop%2C+pages+59%E2%80%93+64%2C+Pittsburgh%2C+June%2E+NAACL%2E) 3. Charles J. Fillmore, Charles Wooters, and Collin F. Baker. 2001. Building a large lexical databank which provides deep semantics. In Benjamin Tsou and Olivia Kwong, editors, Proceedings of the 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, Hong Kong. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Charles+J%2E+Fillmore%2C+Charles+Wooters%2C+and+Collin+F%2E+Baker%2E+2001%2E+Building+a+large+lexical+databank+which+provides+deep+semantics%2E+In+Benjamin+Tsou+and+Olivia+Kwong%2C+editors%2C+Proceedings+of+the+15th+Pa) 4. Daniel Gildea and Daniel Jurafsky. 2000. Automatic labeling of semantic roles. In ACL 2000: Proceedings of ACL 2000, Hong Kong. Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Daniel+Gildea+and+Daniel+Jurafsky%2E+2000%2E+Automatic+labeling+of+semantic+roles%2E+In+ACL+2000%3A+Proceedings+of+ACL+2000%2C+Hong+Kong%2E+Association+for+Computational+Linguistics%2E) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/gildea-2002-automatic-labeling-semantic-roles/) 5. Daniel Gildea. 2001. Statistical Language Understanding Using Frame Semantics. Ph.d. diss, University of California, Berkeley. Available at [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/˜](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/˜) dgildea/. [↗](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/˜) 6. John B. Lowe, Collin F. Baker, and Charles J. Fillmore. 1997. A frame-semantic approach to semantic annotation. In Marc Light, editor, Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What and How? Special Interest Group on the Lexicon, Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=John+B%2E+Lowe%2C+Collin+F%2E+Baker%2C+and+Charles+J%2E+Fillmore%2E+1997%2E+A+frame%2Dsemantic+approach+to+semantic+annotation%2E+In+Marc+Light%2C+editor%2C+Tagging+Text+with+Lexical+Semantics%3A+Why%2C+What+and+How%3F+Special+I) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lowe-1997-frame-semantic-approach-semantic-annotation/) 7. Figure 1: Structure of the frame database [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Figure+1%3A+Structure+of+the+frame+database)