Using WordNet to Extend FrameNet Coverage

In English We present two methods to address the problem of sparsity in the FrameNet lexical database. The first method is based on the idea that a word that belongs to a frame is ``similar'' to the other words in that frame. We measure the similarity using a WordNet-based variant of the Lesk metric. The second method uses the sequence of synsets in WordNet hypernym trees as feature vectors that can be used to train a classifier to determine whether a word belongs to a frame or not. The extended dictionary produced by the second method was used in a system for FrameNet-based
semantic analysis and gave an improvement in recall.
We believe that the methods are useful for bootstrapping FrameNets for new languages.