---
title: "The FrameNet tagset for frame-semantic and — Johnson 2000"
description: "The paper describes the annotation scheme of the Berkeley FrameNet Project."
authors: ["Christopher Johnson", "Charles J. Fillmore"]
year: 2000
venue: "1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/A00-2008/"
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/johnson-2000-framenet-tagset-frame-semantic-syntactic/"
---
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# The FrameNet tagset for frame-semantic and syntactic coding of predicate-argument structure

**Authors:** Christopher Johnson, [Charles J. Fillmore](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/charles-j-fillmore/) · **Year:** 2000 · **Venue:** 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for 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/A00-2008/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/A00-2008.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1814908022)

**Citations:** 98 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · 17 in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper describes the annotation scheme of the Berkeley FrameNet Project. This corpus-based lexicography effort, grounded in Fillmore's frame semantics, records how the semantic roles of English verbs, nouns and adjectives surface in syntax. Each word is tied to a frame, a schematic situation whose participants are frame elements (FEs). Annotators work on sentences from the British National Corpus (BNC). They label the constituents around a target word with FE names, and a phrase labeler then automatically assigns each constituent a Phrase Type and a Grammatical Function. The scheme also covers roles that are understood but left unexpressed, using three categories of null instantiation. The authors illustrate the approach with the Communication domain, from a basic verbal communication frame to more specific Statement and Conversation frames. They then contrast FrameNet with WordNet and COMLEX, neither of which connects syntactic arguments to semantic roles. The main contribution is this explicit linking of roles to syntax, which complements existing lexicons and could support word sense disambiguation.

## Key points
- Annotation is XML produced with Mitre's Alembic Workbench on BNC sentences. The Phrase Type inventory (NP, PP, VPto, Sfin, AjP, Quo, etc.) was built with reference to Comlex syntax.
- The Grammatical Functions are Ext, Comp, Obj, Mod, Xtrap, Pred, Head and Gen. The scheme does not separate obliques from complements.
- Unexpressed FEs are tagged as Indefinite (INI), Definite (DNI) or Constructionally Licensed (CNI) Null Instantiation, for example the omitted Message of *tell* or the subject of a passive.
- Frames are grouped into 14 domains (e.g. Body, Cognition, Communication, Motion, Transaction, General). Basic Verbal Communication FEs are Speaker, Addressee, Message, Topic, Medium and Code.
- The three WordNet senses of *argue* map to the Statement, Conversation and Evidence frames. FrameNet shows that these senses take different argument structures, a distinction WordNet's sentence frames do not capture.

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

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{johnson2000framenet,
  title = {{The FrameNet tagset for frame-semantic and syntactic coding of predicate-argument structure}},
  author = {Johnson, Christopher and Fillmore, Charles J.},
  booktitle = {1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2000},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/A00-2008/}
}
```

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## References

18 references, 2 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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