---
title: "New Features for FrameNet - WordNet Mapping — Tonelli 2009"
description: "FrameNet offers rich frame-semantic annotation, but its coverage is limited."
authors: ["Sara Tonelli", "Daniele Pighin"]
year: 2009
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2009)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W09-1127/"
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/tonelli-2009-new-features-framenet-wordnet-mapping/"
---
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# New Features for FrameNet - WordNet Mapping

**Authors:** [Sara Tonelli](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/sara-tonelli/), [Daniele Pighin](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/daniele-pighin/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2009) · **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/W09-1127/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W09-1127.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7100050645)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [24](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
FrameNet offers rich frame-semantic annotation, but its coverage is limited. Many lexical units (LUs) have only a dictionary-style definition and no example sentences, and some frames contain just one or two LUs. Tonelli and Pighin address this by linking FrameNet LUs to WordNet synsets automatically. They train a single Support Vector Machine (SVM) on a small set of manually annotated LU–synset pairs, rather than one classifier per frame. Its compact feature set draws on information earlier work mostly ignored, chiefly stem overlap between the LU definition and the synset gloss, plus WordNet domain labels. Because the method does not need example sentences or large frames, it also works for poorly documented LUs. The resulting mapping, MapNet, reaches about 0.79 precision. The authors then use it to add LUs to English FrameNet, to populate an Italian FrameNet through MultiWordNet, and to label the MultiSemCor parallel corpus with frames. This shows that a cheap supervised mapping can substantially reduce the manual effort of building FrameNet-like resources, including for new languages.

## Key points
- **Mapping scale:** MapNet considers 33,698 candidate LU–synset pairs, covering 9,120 of 10,100 FrameNet v1.3 LUs, and keeps 5,162 mapped pairs at roughly 0.79 precision.
- **English FrameNet extension:** The method adds 4,265 new LUs to 521 frames, enlarging the resource by almost 42%. A manual check of 100 new LUs found 78% correct.
- **Italian frame population:** Using MultiWordNet, the method induces 6,429 Italian LUs for 561 frames. In an evaluation of 15 frames containing 191 LUs, 88% were correct.
- **MultiSemCor annotation:** Across 12,843 parallel sentences, the method produces 27,793 English and 23,872 Italian frame-labelled instances. On 200 sampled sentences per side, 75% of English and 70% of Italian labels were correct.
- **Future work:** The gold standard for training came from De Cao and Basili. The authors plan to add syntactic features and to extend the mapping to other MultiWordNet languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew and Romanian.

*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

24 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 21 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/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{tonelli2009new,
  title = {{New Features for FrameNet - WordNet Mapping}},
  author = {Tonelli, Sara and Pighin, Daniele},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2009)},
  year = {2009},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W09-1127/}
}
```

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## References

24 references, 5 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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