Using a Distributional Neighbourhood Graph to Enrich Semantic Frames in the Field of the Environment.

This paper presents a semi-automatic method for identifying terms that evoke semantic frames (Fillmore, 1982). The method is tested as a means of identifying lexical units that can be added to existing frames or to new, related frames, using a large corpus on the environment. It is hypothesized that a method based on distributional semantics, which exploits the assumption that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meanings, can help unveil lexical units that evoke the same frame or related frames. The method employs a distributional neighbourhood graph, in which each word is connected to its nearest neighbours according to a distributional semantic model. Results show that most lexical units identified using this method can in fact be assigned to frames related to the field of the environment.