Human speakers have an extensive toolkit of ways to express themselves. In this paper, we engage with an idea largely absent from discussions of meaning in natural language understanding—namely, that the way something is expressed reflects different ways of conceptualizing or construing the information being conveyed. We first define this phenomenon more precisely, drawing on considerable prior work in theoretical cognitive semantics and psycholinguistics. We then survey some dimensions of construed meaning and show how insights from construal could inform theoretical and practical work in NLP.

Framenets as an incarnation of frame semantics have been set up to deal with lexicographic issues (cf. Fillmore and Baker 2010, among others). They are thus concerned with lexical units (LUs) and the conceptual structure which categorizes these together. These lexically-evoked frames, however, do not reflect pragmatic properties of constructions (LUs and other types of constructions), such as expressing illocutions or being considered polite or very informal. From the viewpoint of a multilingual annotation effort, the Global FrameNet Shared Annotation Task, we discuss two phenomena, greetings and tag questions, which highlight the necessity both to investigate the role between construction and frame annotation on the one hand and to develop pragmatic frames describing social interactions which are not explicitly lexicalized.

Multimodal aspects of human communication are key in several applications of Natural Language Processing, such as Machine Translation and Natural Language Generation. Despite recent advances in integrating multimodality into Computational Linguistics, the merge between NLP and Computer Vision techniques is still timid, especially when it comes to providing fine-grained accounts for meaning construction. This paper reports on research aiming to determine appropriate methodology and develop a computational tool to annotate multimodal corpora according to a principled structured semantic representation of events, relations and entities: FrameNet. Taking a Brazilian television travel show as corpus, a pilot study was conducted to annotate the frames that are evoked by the audio and the ones that are evoked by visual elements. We also implemented a Multimodal Annotation tool which allows annotators to choose frames and locate frame elements both in the text and in the images, while keeping track of the time span in which those elements are active in each modality. Results suggest that adding a multimodal domain to the linguistic layer of annotation and analysis contributes both to enrich the kind of information that can be tagged in a corpus, and to enhance FrameNet as a model of linguistic cognition.

Although FrameNet is recognized as one of the most fine-grained lexical databases, its coverage of lexical units is still limited. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-step frame induction process: for a set of lexical units not yet present in Berkeley FrameNet data release 1.7, first remove those that cannot fit into any existing semantic frame in FrameNet; then, assign the remaining lexical units to their correct frames. We also present the Semi-supervised Deep Embedded Clustering with Anomaly Detection (SDEC-AD) model—an algorithm that maps high-dimensional contextualized vector representations of lexical units to a low-dimensional latent space for better frame prediction and uses reconstruction error to identify lexical units that cannot evoke frames in FrameNet. SDEC-AD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both steps of the frame induction process. Empirical results also show that definitions provide contextual information for representing and characterizing the frame membership of lexical units.

We propose a metric for machine translation evaluation based on frame semantics which does not require the use of reference translations or human corrections, but is aimed at comparing original and translated output directly. The metrics is described on the basis of an existing manual frame-semantic annotation of a parallel corpus with an English original and a Brazilian Portuguese and a German translation. We discuss implications of our metrics design, including the potential of scaling it for multiple languages.