---
title: "BiFrameNet: Bilingual Frame Semantics Resource — Fung 2004"
description: "Chinese had no frame-semantic resource comparable to the English FrameNet, which limited semantic transfer in English–Chinese machine translation."
authors: ["Pascale Fung", "Benfeng Chen"]
year: 2004
venue: "COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/C04-1134/"
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/fung-2004-biframenet-bilingual-frame-semantics-resource/"
---
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# BiFrameNet: Bilingual Frame Semantics Resource Construction by Cross-lingual Induction

**Authors:** [Pascale Fung](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/pascale-fung/), Benfeng Chen · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics · **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/C04-1134/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C04-1134.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W6980205298)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [10](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Chinese had no frame-semantic resource comparable to the English FrameNet, which limited semantic transfer in English–Chinese machine translation. The authors build BiFrameNet automatically, without manual seed mappings, by linking English FrameNet lexical entries to Chinese word senses (concepts) in HowNet. The method has three stages:
1. It proposes candidate links through two bilingual lexicons (HowNet and the LDC dictionary), keeping only pairs whose part of speech matches.
2. It disambiguates by letting the other lexical entries of the same frame vote for HowNet categories.
3. It recovers wrongly discarded senses using a HowNet taxonomy similarity measure.

The resource also needs Chinese example sentences. For these, the authors align Chinese and English POS sequences with dynamic programming, using POS transfer costs learned from a parallel corpus. Each aligned Chinese word inherits the semantic role of its English counterpart.

On highly ambiguous entries, lexical alignment reaches about 82% average F-measure. Role annotation of the induced Chinese sentences is roughly 68–72% accurate. The result is a bilingual semantic lexicon that can support statistical MT, transfer-based MT and computer-aided translation.

## Key points
- **Resources:** Berkeley FrameNet (over 7000 English lexical items with role-annotated examples), Chinese HowNet, the LDC English–Chinese dictionary, and the Hong Kong News parallel corpus.
- **Lexical mapping:** Disambiguation keeps the top N=3 HowNet categories per frame. Pruned categories are restored through a taxonomy similarity score (Liu and Li, 2002) with α=1.6.
- **Lexical evaluation:** Tested on the most ambiguous entries, each with 124–145 candidate HowNet links.
  - Large frames reach an overall F-measure of 87.4%, up from 52.3% after step 1 alone.
  - Small frames (24% of frames) reach 64.9%.
  - The weighted average is about 82%; beat.v alone scores 89.72.
- **Example sentences:** POS tagging used the Ratnaparkhi maximum entropy tagger for English and an HMM tagger (ICTCLAS) for Chinese. In the cause_harm frame, role annotation accuracy is 68% on average and 71.8% for the top 100 sentences ranked by DP score.

*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/) · [Part-of-speech tagging](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/part-of-speech-tagging/)

## Cited by

Cited by

10 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 6 not yet.

- [Probabilistic Frame-Semantic Parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/das-2010-probabilistic-frame-semantic-parsing/)
- [Semi-Supervised Frame-Semantic Parsing for Unknown Predicates](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/das-2011-semi-supervised-frame-semantic-parsing/)
- [Frame-Semantic Parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/das-2014-frame-semantic-parsing/)
- [A FrameNet-Based Semantic Role Labeler for Swedish](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/johansson-2006-framenet-based-semantic-role-labeler/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{fung2004biframenet,
  title = {{BiFrameNet: Bilingual Frame Semantics Resource Construction by Cross-lingual Induction}},
  author = {Fung, Pascale and Chen, Benfeng},
  booktitle = {COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2004},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C04-1134/}
}
```

- [← previous Automatic Identification of Infrequent Word Senses](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/aclbulk-2004-mccarthy-automatic-identification-infrequent-word-senses/)
- [next → BootCaT: Bootstrapping Corpora and Terms from the Web](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/baroni-2004-bootcat-bootstrapping-corpora-terms-web/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2004/)

## References

14 references, 5 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 Proceedings of the COLING-ACL, Montreal, Canada. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Collin+F%2E+Baker%2C+Charles+J%2E+Fillmore+and+John+B%2E+Lowe%2E+%281998%29%2EThe+Berkeley+FrameNet+project%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+COLING%2DACL%2C+Montreal%2C+Canada%2E) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lex-1998-baker-berkeley-framenet/)
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