FinnFN 1.0: The Finnish frame semantic database

Abstract

The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the project was to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus. Applying the Berkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English.