Verbs of visual perception in Italian FrameNet

In this paper, we present a frame semantic analysis of a small group of Italian verbs expressing visual perception, which constitutes the first stage of a project for developing an Italian FrameNet. Our results show a close correspondence between English and Italian perception-related frames. The main element of novelty in our approach is that the creation and annotation of Lexical Units is grounded in distributional information automatically acquired from a large, dependency-parsed corpus, which is balanced against the annotator’s linguistic intuition. We claim that this can help to overcome some of the shortcomings of the classical lexicographic method used to create FrameNet.