Comparison of Semantic Frames in Parallel German and French Sentences

Our project in the context of the MA course “Semantic Techniques in Multilingual Text Analysis” consisted in the comparison of semantic frames in 20 parallel aligned German and French sentences of the SMULTRON Alpine Corpus. The aim of the project was to assess whether an automatic transfer of semantic frames can be done via the alignments.The chosen sentences contain three different types of verbs: motion, cogitation and communication verbs. The frames and frame elements were selected according to the guidelines of the FrameNet project. The annotation was done manually with the SALTO Tool. The comparison of the frames is done with a Python script and on the basis of the given alignments. The comparison of our small sample showed that an automatic transfer works efficiently for the frames, but is less productive for the frame elements.