Enriching an Explanatory Dictionary with FrameNet and PropBank Corpus Examples

This paper describes ongoing work to extend an online dictionary of Latvian – Tezaurs.lv – with representative semantically annotated corpus examples according to the FrameNet and PropBank methodologies and word sense inventories. Tezaurs.lv is one of the largest open lexical resources for Latvian, combining information from more than 300 legacy dictionaries and other sources. The corpus examples are extracted from Latvian FrameNet and PropBank corpora, which are manually annotated parallel subsets of a balanced text corpus of contemporary Latvian. The proposed approach augments traditional lexicographic information with modern cross-lingually interpretable information and enables analysis of word senses from the perspective of frame semantics, which is substantially different from (complementary to) the traditional approach applied in Latvian lexicography. In cases where FrameNet and PropBank corpus evidence aligns well with the word sense split in legacy dictionaries, the frame-semantically annotated corpus examples supplement the word sense information with clarifying usage examples and commonly used semantic valence patterns. However, the annotated corpus examples often provide evidence of a different sense split, which is often more coarse-grained and, thus, may help dictionary users to cluster and comprehend a fine-grained sense split suggested by the legacy sources. This is particularly relevant in case of frequently used polysemous verbs.