Collin F. Baker

Also published as: Collin Baker


2023

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Adverbs, Surprisingly
Dmitry Nikolaev | Collin Baker | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Sebastian Padó
Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)

This paper begins with the premise that adverbs are neglected in computational linguistics. This view derives from two analyses: a literature review and a novel adverb dataset to probe a state-of-the-art language model, thereby uncovering systematic gaps in accounts for adverb meaning. We suggest that using Frame Semantics for characterizing word meaning, as in FrameNet, provides a promising approach to adverb analysis, given its ability to describe ambiguity, semantic roles, and null instantiation.

2022

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Frame Shift Prediction
Zheng Xin Yong | Patrick D. Watson | Tiago Timponi Torrent | Oliver Czulo | Collin Baker
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Frame shift is a cross-linguistic phenomenon in translation which results in corresponding pairs of linguistic material evoking different frames. The ability to predict frame shifts would enable (semi-)automatic creation of multilingual frame annotations and thus speeding up FrameNet creation through annotation projection. Here, we first characterize how frame shifts result from other linguistic divergences such as translational divergences and construal differences. Our analysis also shows that many pairs of frames in frame shifts are multi-hop away from each other in Berkeley FrameNet’s net-like configuration. Then, we propose the Frame Shift Prediction task and demonstrate that our graph attention networks, combined with auxiliary training, can learn cross-linguistic frame-to-frame correspondence and predict frame shifts.

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)
Collin F. Baker
Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)

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Comparing Distributional and Curated Approaches for Cross-lingual Frame Alignment
Collin F. Baker | Michael Ellsworth | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Arthur Lorenzi
Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)

Despite advances in statistical approaches to the modeling of meaning, many ques- tions about the ideal way of exploiting both knowledge-based (e.g., FrameNet, WordNet) and data-based methods (e.g., BERT) remain unresolved. This workshop focuses on these questions with three session papers that run the gamut from highly distributional methods (Lekkas et al., 2022), to highly curated methods (Gamonal, 2022), and techniques with statistical methods producing structured semantics (Lawley and Schubert, 2022). In addition, we begin the workshop with a small comparison of cross-lingual techniques for frame semantic alignment for one language pair (Spanish and English). None of the distributional techniques consistently aligns the 1-best frame match from English to Spanish, all failing in at least one case. Predicting which techniques will align which frames cross-linguistically is not possible from any known characteristic of the alignment technique or the frames. Although distributional techniques are a rich source of semantic information for many tasks, at present curated, knowledge-based semantics remains the only technique that can consistently align frames across languages.

2021

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FrameNet and Typology
Michael Ellsworth | Collin Baker | Miriam R. L. Petruck
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP

FrameNet and the Multilingual FrameNet project have produced multilingual semantic annotations of parallel texts that yield extremely fine-grained typological insights. Moreover, frame semantic annotation of a wide cross-section of languages would provide information on the limits of Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, Fillmore1985). Multilingual semantic annotation offers critical input for research on linguistic diversity and recurrent patterns in computational typology. Drawing on results from FrameNet annotation of parallel texts, this paper proposes frame semantic annotation as a new component to complement the state of the art in computational semantic typology.

2020

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Proceedings of the International FrameNet Workshop 2020: Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet
Tiago T. Torrent | Collin F. Baker | Oliver Czulo | Kyoko Ohara | Miriam R. L. Petruck
Proceedings of the International FrameNet Workshop 2020: Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet

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Exploring Crosslinguistic Frame Alignment
Collin F. Baker | Arthur Lorenzi
Proceedings of the International FrameNet Workshop 2020: Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet

The FrameNet (FN) project at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (ICSI), which documents the core vocabulary of contemporary English, was the first lexical resource based on Fillmore’s theory of Frame Semantics. Berkeley FrameNet has inspired related projects in roughly a dozen other languages, which have evolved somewhat independently; the current Multilingual FrameNet project (MLFN) is an attempt to find alignments between all of them. The alignment problem is complicated by the fact that these projects have adhered to the Berkeley FrameNet model to varying degrees, and they were also founded at different times, when different versions of the Berkeley FrameNet data were available. We describe several new methods for finding relations of similarity between semantic frames across languages. We will demonstrate ViToXF, a new tool which provides interactive visualizations of these cross-lingual relations, between frames, lexical units, and frame elements, based on resources such as multilingual dictionaries and on shared distributional vector spaces, making clear the strengths and weaknesses of different alignment methods.

2018

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Frame Semantics across Languages: Towards a Multilingual FrameNet
Collin F. Baker | Michael Ellsworth | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Swabha Swayamdipta
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

2017

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Graph Methods for Multilingual FrameNets
Collin F. Baker | Michael Ellsworth
Proceedings of TextGraphs-11: the Workshop on Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing

This paper introduces a new, graph-based view of the data of the FrameNet project, which we hope will make it easier to understand the mixture of semantic and syntactic information contained in FrameNet annotation. We show how English FrameNet and other Frame Semantic resources can be represented as sets of interconnected graphs of frames, frame elements, semantic types, and annotated instances of them in text. We display examples of the new graphical representation based on the annotations, which combine Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, thus capturing most of the syntax and semantics of each sentence. We consider how graph theory could help researchers to make better use of FrameNet data for tasks such as automatic Frame Semantic role labeling, paraphrasing, and translation. Finally, we describe the development of FrameNet-like lexical resources for other languages in the current Multilingual FrameNet project. which seeks to discover cross-lingual alignments, both in the lexicon (for frames and lexical units within frames) and across parallel or comparable texts. We conclude with an example showing graphically the semantic and syntactic similarities and differences between parallel sentences in English and Japanese. We will release software for displaying such graphs from the current data releases.

2015

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Getting the Roles Right: Using FrameNet in NLP
Collin F. Baker | Nathan Schneider | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Michael Ellsworth
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

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Scaling Semantic Frame Annotation
Nancy Chang | Praveen Paritosh | David Huynh | Collin F. Baker
Proceedings of the 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2014

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FrameNet: A Knowledge Base for Natural Language Processing
Collin F. Baker
Proceedings of Frame Semantics in NLP: A Workshop in Honor of Chuck Fillmore (1929-2014)

2012

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The MASC Word Sense Corpus
Rebecca J. Passonneau | Collin F. Baker | Christiane Fellbaum | Nancy Ide
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

The MASC project has produced a multi-genre corpus with multiple layers of linguistic annotation, together with a sentence corpus containing WordNet 3.1 sense tags for 1000 occurrences of each of 100 words produced by multiple annotators, accompanied by indepth inter-annotator agreement data. Here we give an overview of the contents of MASC and then focus on the word sense sentence corpus, describing the characteristics that differentiate it from other word sense corpora and detailing the inter-annotator agreement studies that have been performed on the annotations. Finally, we discuss the potential to grow the word sense sentence corpus through crowdsourcing and the plan to enhance the content and annotations of MASC through a community-based collaborative effort.

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Empirical Comparisons of MASC Word Sense Annotations
Gerard de Melo | Collin F. Baker | Nancy Ide | Rebecca J. Passonneau | Christiane Fellbaum
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

We analyze how different conceptions of lexical semantics affect sense annotations and how multiple sense inventories can be compared empirically, based on annotated text. Our study focuses on the MASC project, where data has been annotated using WordNet sense identifiers on the one hand, and FrameNet lexical units on the other. This allows us to compare the sense inventories of these lexical resources empirically rather than just theoretically, based on their glosses, leading to new insights. In particular, we compute contingency matrices and develop a novel measure, the Expected Jaccard Index, that quantifies the agreement between annotations of the same data based on two different resources even when they have different sets of categories.

2011

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How Good is the Crowd at “real” WSD?
Jisup Hong | Collin F. Baker
Proceedings of the 5th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

2010

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Aligning FrameNet and WordNet based on Semantic Neighborhoods
Óscar Ferrández | Michael Ellsworth | Rafael Muñoz | Collin F. Baker
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

This paper presents an algorithm for aligning FrameNet lexical units to WordNet synsets. Both, FrameNet and WordNet, are well-known as well as widely-used resources by the entire research community. They help systems in the comprehension of the semantics of texts, and therefore, finding strategies to link FrameNet and WordNet involves challenges related to a better understanding of the human language. Such deep analysis is exploited by researchers to improve the performance of their applications. The alignment is achieved by exploiting the particular characteristics of each lexical-semantic resource, with special emphasis on the explicit, formal semantic relations in each. Semantic neighborhoods are computed for each alignment of lemmas, and the algorithm calculates correlation scores by comparing such neighborhoods. The results suggest that the proposed algorithm is appropriate for aligning the FrameNet and WordNet hierarchies. Furthermore, the algorithm can aid research on increasing the coverage of FrameNet, building FrameNets in other languages, and creating a system for querying a joint FrameNet-WordNet hierarchy.

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The Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus: A Community Resource for and by the People
Nancy Ide | Collin Baker | Christiane Fellbaum | Rebecca Passonneau
Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers

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SemEval-2010 Task 10: Linking Events and Their Participants in Discourse
Josef Ruppenhofer | Caroline Sporleder | Roser Morante | Collin Baker | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

2009

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SemEval-2010 Task 10: Linking Events and Their Participants in Discourse
Josef Ruppenhofer | Caroline Sporleder | Roser Morante | Collin Baker | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Evaluations: Recent Achievements and Future Directions (SEW-2009)

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WordNet and FrameNet as Complementary Resources for Annotation
Collin F. Baker | Christiane Fellbaum
Proceedings of the Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW III)

2008

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MASC: the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus of American English
Nancy Ide | Collin Baker | Christiane Fellbaum | Charles Fillmore | Rebecca Passonneau
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

To answer the critical need for sharable, reusable annotated resources with rich linguistic annotations, we are developing a Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) including texts from diverse genres and manual annotations or manually-validated annotations for multiple levels, including WordNet senses and FrameNet frames and frame elements, both of which have become significant resources in the international computational linguistics community. To derive maximal benefit from the semantic information provided by these resources, the MASC will also include manually-validated shallow parses and named entities, which will enable linking WordNet senses and FrameNet frames within the same sentences into more complex semantic structures and, because named entities will often be the role fillers of FrameNet frames, enrich the semantic and pragmatic information derivable from the sub-corpus. All MASC annotations will be published with detailed inter-annotator agreement measures. The MASC and its annotations will be freely downloadable from the ANC website, thus providing maximum accessibility for researchers from around the globe.

2007

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SemEval-2007 Task 19: Frame Semantic Structure Extraction
Collin Baker | Michael Ellsworth | Katrin Erk
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2007)

2004

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FrameNet as a “Net”
Charles J. Fillmore | Collin F. Baker | Hiroaki Sato
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

2003

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Putting FrameNet Data into the ISO Linguistic Annotation Framework
Srinivas Narayanan | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Collin F. Baker | Charles J. Fillmore
Proceedings of the ACL 2003 Workshop on Linguistic Annotation: Getting the Model Right

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The FrameNet Data and Software
Collin F. Baker | Hiroaki Sato
The Companion Volume to the Proceedings of 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2002

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Seeing Arguments through Transparent Structures
Charles J. Fillmore | Collin F. Baker | Hiroaki Sato
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02)

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The FrameNet Database and Software Tools
Charles J. Fillmore | Collin F. Baker | Hiroaki Sato
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02)

2001

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Building a Large Lexical Databank Which Provides Deep Semantics
Charles J. Fillmore | Charles Wooters | Collin F. Baker
Proceedings of the 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

1998

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The Berkeley FrameNet Project
Collin F. Baker | Charles J. Fillmore | John B. Lowe
36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 1

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The Berkeley FrameNet Project
Collin F. Baker | Charles J. Fillmore | John B. Lowe
COLING 1998 Volume 1: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics