THE JAPANESE FRAMENET PROJECT: A Preliminary Report

摘要

This report presents an overview of the Japanese FrameNet (JFN) research project, which started in July 2002. The goal of JFN is to create a corpus-based lexicon of Japanese described in terms of frame semantics. While JFN aims at building a Japanese lexicon in collaboration with the Berkeley FrameNet Project, an important question being asked by JFN is whether Japanese words can be described in FrameNet style, i.e., along the same lines as English words, employing the same frame semantic approach. This point is illustrated in this paper with an example of preliminary analysis of Japanese communication verbs. Finally, it is argued that while JFN can be described as a lexicographic project, such an effort will be of great use to NLP applications such as machine translation and to learners of Japanese.