--- title: "A Frame-Semantic Approach to Semantic Annotation — Lowe 1997" description: "Corpus semantic annotation needs a tagset. Generic thematic roles are disputed in number, and roles tailored to individual predicates threaten to…" authors: ["John B. Lowe"] year: 1997 venue: "Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How?" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W97-0204/" 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/lowe-1997-frame-semantic-approach-semantic-annotation/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lowe-1997-frame-semantic-approach-semantic-annotation/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1997/) / A Frame-Semantic Approach to Semantic Annotation # A Frame-Semantic Approach to Semantic Annotation **Authors:** [John B. Lowe](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/john-b-lowe/) · **Year:** 1997 · **Venue:** Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How? · **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/W97-0204/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W97-0204.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3088277579) **Citations:** 78 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [27](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Corpus semantic annotation needs a tagset. Generic thematic roles are disputed in number, and roles tailored to individual predicates threaten to multiply without limit. The authors work in the FrameNet project, then just starting at Berkeley (ICSI). They argue that frame semantics gives a principled way to choose and organize tags. Words are described as evoking frames, which are schematized scenarios such as a commercial transaction or a health-care event. Sentence constituents are then labeled with the frame elements they realize. Frames can form hierarchies, so a subframe (e.g., buying real estate with a loan) inherits elements from its parent, which keeps tagsets compact. Using a Health frame, the paper shows how corpus evidence and metaphor justify distinctions such as DISEASE versus WOUND. It also shows how combinations of elements (Frame Element Groups) characterize verb senses, and how omitted or doubly realized elements should be marked. No experimental results are reported. The contribution is a methodology and a plan for a hand-annotated starter lexicon that could later support automatic tagging and word sense disambiguation. ## Key points - The project context is FrameNet ("Tools for lexicon building"), led by PI Charles J. Fillmore at ICSI Berkeley. It was funded by NSF grant IRI 96-18838 and started on March 1, 1997. - The CommercialTransaction frame has the elements BUYER, SELLER, PAYMENT and GOODS. The RealEstateTransaction frame inherits these and adds BORROWER, LOAN and LENDER, following inheritance ideas similar to the ACQUILEX Project. - The Health frame elements include HEALER, PATIENT, DISEASE, WOUND, BODYPART, SYMPTOM, TREATMENT and MEDICINE. DISEASE and WOUND stay separate because diseases are "cured" while wounds "heal." Metaphorical objects support the split: *ills* goes with cure, and *rift*, *schism* and *breach* go with heal. - The annotation records the status of missing elements, such as an implied disease in "The doctor cured me." A single constituent can carry several roles, as with *leper* or *diabetic*, tagged Pd (PATIENT plus DISEASE). - The planned starter lexicon covers about 5,000 lexical items, with token frequencies of FEGs per word sense. Later partial automation would draw on WordNet synonyms and hypernyms and on thesauri. *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 27 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 7 of them have a page here, 20 not yet. - [Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution with Rich Linguistic Features](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bejan-2010-unsupervised-event-coreference-resolution-rich/) - [Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bejan-2014-unsupervised-event-coreference-resolution/) - [Bilingual FrameNet Dictionaries for Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/boas-2002-bilingual-framenet-dictionaries-machine-translation/) - [The FrameNet Database and Software Tools](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/fillmore-2002-framenet-database-software-tools/) - [The FrameNet tagset for frame-semantic and syntactic coding of predicate-argument structure](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/johnson-2000-framenet-tagset-frame-semantic-syntactic/) - [The Berkeley FrameNet Project](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lex-1998-baker-berkeley-framenet/) - [Semantic Tagging for the Penn Treebank](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/palmer-2000-semantic-tagging-penn-treebank/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{lowe1997frame, title = {{A Frame-Semantic Approach to Semantic Annotation}}, author = {Lowe, John B.}, booktitle = {Tagging Text with Lexical Semantics: Why, What, and How?}, year = {1997}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/W97-0204/} } ``` - [← previous A Fast and Portable Realizer for Text Generation Systems](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lavoie-1997-fast-portable-realizer-text-generation/) - [next → An Empirical Approach to VP Ellipsis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/cl-1997-hardt-empirical-approach-vp-ellipsis/) - [↑ back to papers of 1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1997/) ## References 14 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Ted Briscoe, Valeria De Paiva, and Ann Copestake, editors. 1993. Inheritance, Defaults and the Lexicon. Studies in Natural Language Processing. 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