Ely Edison da Silva Matos

Chapter 4. Towards continuity between the lexicon and the constructicon in FrameNet Brasil

This chapter presents the theoretical discussion, analytical procedures, and corresponding computational implementations carried out by FrameNet Brasil to take the principle of the continuity between grammar and the lexicon to the computational domain by deeply integrating two frame-based resources under development for Brazilian Portuguese: a lexicon and a constructicon. To achieve this goal, we start by discussing the continuity principle in the Construction Grammar paradigm, that is, the founding idea that both the lexicon and what is usually referred to in most traditions as grammar can be accounted for in terms of constructions. After, we present the computational solutions that led to the development of a new common database structure for the FrameNet Brasil Lexicon and Construction: FN-Br 2.0. Finally, we present the analyses of two constructions in Brazilian Portuguese: the Dative with Infinitive Construction, which illustrates currently available features of FN-Br 2.0, and the Inceptive Aspect Construction, which imposes a series of new challenges to the model.

FrameNet-Based Automatic Suggestion of Translation Equivalents

This paper presents an application developed for automatically suggesting translation equivalents in a frame-based domain specific trilingual electronic dictionary covering the domains of the World Cup and Tourism. By comparing the syntactic and semantic affordances of a lexical unit in the source language with those shown by all lexical units evoking the same frame in a target language, the application suggests which of them is the best-fit translation equivalent. The application contributes to the purpose of bringing to scale the development of frame-based multilingual lexical databases. We discuss the current limitations of the application, especially those regarding entity nouns, and propose the use of ontologies and qualia structure as a means of enhancing machine translation for entity nouns.