Building Chinese FrameNet database

In this paper, we introduce the Chinese FrameNet project which is creating a FrameNet style lexicon for Chinese, based on the principles of frame semantics, in which lexical units are described in the frames evoked by them with other constituents which express the participants (frame elements) in these frames. Our lexicon also contains detailed information about the possible syntactic realizations of frame elements, derived from annotated corpus examples. Chinese and English lexical units that involve describing events of cognition are compared and differences between the lexicalization patterns and syntactic realization patterns in both languages are described. Finally, we suggest that the existing descriptions of English language based frames can be used to describe the conceptual structures of Chinese lexicon, but the frame membership (lexical units) and syntactic realization patterns must be determined in terms of Chinese syntactic and semantic properties.