Wikipedia-based WSD for multilingual frame annotation

Many applications in the context of natural language processing have been proven to achieve a significant performance when exploiting semantic information extracted from high-quality annotated resources. However, the practical use of such resources is often biased by their limited coverage. Furthermore, they are generally available only for English and few other languages.We propose a novel methodology that, starting from the mapping between FrameNet lexical units and Wikipedia pages, automatically leverages from Wikipedia new lexical units and example sentences. The goal is to build a reference data set for the semi-automatic development of new FrameNets. In addition, this methodology can be adapted to perform frame identification in any language available in Wikipedia.Our approach relies on a state-of-the-art word sense disambiguation system that is first trained on English Wikipedia to assign a page to the lexical units in a frame. Then, this mapping is further exploited to perform frame identification in English or in any other language available in Wikipedia. Our approach shows a high potential in multilingual settings, because it can be applied to languages for which other lexical resources such as WordNet or thesauri are not available.