This article presents the first output of the Dutch FrameNet annotation tool, which facilitates both referential- and frame annotations of language-independent corpora. On the referential level, the tool links in-text mentions to structured data, grounding the text in the real world. On the frame level, those same mentions are annotated with respect to their semantic sense. This way of annotating not only generates a rich linguistic dataset that is grounded in real-world event instances, but also guides the annotators in frame identification, resulting in high inter-annotator-agreement and consistent annotations across documents and at discourse level, exceeding traditional sentence level annotations of frame elements. Moreover, the annotation tool features a dynamic lexical lookup that increases the development of a cross-domain FrameNet lexicon.

We introduce an annotation tool whose purpose is to gain insights into variation of framing by combining FrameNet annotation with referential annotation. English FrameNet enables researchers to study variation in framing at the conceptual level as well through its packaging in language. We enrich FrameNet annotations in two ways. First, we introduce the referential aspect. Secondly, we annotate on complete texts to encode connections between mentions. As a result, we can analyze the variation of framing for one particular event across multiple mentions and (cross-lingual) documents. We can examine how an event is framed over time and how core frame elements are expressed throughout a complete text. The data model starts with a representation of an event type. Each event type has many incidents linked to it, and each incident has several reference texts describing it as well as structured data about the incident. The user can apply two types of annotations: 1) mappings from expressions to frames and frame elements, 2) reference relations from mentions to events and participants of the structured data.