Towards an LFG Syntax-Semantics Interface for Frame Semantics Annotation

We present an LFG syntax-semantics interface for the semi-automatic annotation of frame semantic roles for German in the SALSA project. The architecture is intended to support a bootstrapping cycle for the acquisition of stochastic models for frame semantic role assignment, starting from manual annotations on the basis of the syntactically annotated TIGER treebank, with smooth transition to automatic syntactic analysis and (semi-)automatic semantic annotation of a much larger corpus, on top of a free-running LFG grammar of German. Our study investigates the applicability of the LFG formalism for modeling frame semantic role annotation, and designs a flexible and extensible syntax-semantics architecture that supports the induction of stochastic models for automatic frame assignment. We propose a method familiar from example-based Machine Translation to translate between the TIGER and LFG annotation formats, thus enabling the transition from treebank annotation to large-scale corpus processing.

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