The writing process of encyclopaedic definitions for a frame-based specialized dictionary: Findings and perspectives from the analysis of Dicionário Olímpico

The present work reports on an analysis focused on the frame descriptions of a Brazilian frame-based dictionary, the Dicionario Olimpico (Olympic Dictionary) (Chishman et al. 2016), aiming to develop a standardization strategy for the writing of frame definitions. In general, the planning of the Dicionario Olimpico owes its inspiration to the FrameNet Project (Fillmore & Atkins, 1998; Fillmore & Baker, 2001; Fontenelle, 2003), the pioneer enterprise in applying the notion of semantic frame to language description; however, many structural aspects were adapted due to the differences between the target audience of each tool. ----- In contrast to the FrameNet Project, in Dicionario Olimpico the frame description characterizes the events and entities related to the sports without using the frame elements as a starting point. Each editor was responsible for a group of sports, and although following a general orientation about the information and the level of complexity, they had the possibility to determine which information was relevant to describe the frames based on the study of the sport. Such possibility resulted in a lack of standardization regarding the type of information and how this information is presented to the resource’s user, demonstrating the need for further discussions. ----- Dicionario Olimpico presents two types of frames: frames of events, which refer to the set of actions that make up the competitions and are to some extent specific to a given sport; and ontological frames, which refer to the description of objects and participants (cf. Souza, 2015) and are recurrent in many if not all sports. Since our study seeks to propose the standardization of frame definitions, our analysis focuses on the ontological frames, which are recurrent in more than one sport and whose definitions allow for such a discussion. ----- For the first stage of our study, we carried out the analysis of the ontological frames (i.e., competition officials, athletes, competition location, equipment, and technical team) of all sports in order to identify the type of information presented in each of them. The next step consisted of grouping the sports based on similar shared features in order to identify standardization within these groups. This task was grounded in Gonzalez’s (2004) sports classification, from which it was possible to establish six different groups. ----- On the one hand, our analysis allowed us to identify a certain degree of standardization on a general level, as well as on sport-group level, which could be used as a starting point for a proposal of the standardization of the ontological frame definitions. On the other hand, some information is presented only in the frame definition of a single sport. In these cases, this could reflect an editor’s decision based on subjective criteria and not on the sport structure OR could be important information that reflects the sport structure and should thus be presented in other sports of the same type as well. These represent quite encouraging preliminary findings as they provide the ground to develop a proposal for modelling the frame-definition writing, while respecting each sports' specificities and without each editor having to decide which information should be presented based on subjective criteria. -------------------------------------------------- References ----- Chishman, R. 2016. Dicionario Olimpico. Porto Alegre: Plural Web. Fillmore, C.J., Atkins, B.T.S. 1998. FrameNet and lexicographic relevance. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Granada, Spain, 417-423. 41 Fillmore, C.J., Baker, C.F. 2001. Frame Semantics for Text Understanding. In: Proceedings of WordNet and Other Lexical Resources Workshop. (North American Association for Computational Linguistics.). 3–4 June, 2001. Pittsburgh, USA. Available: https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/node/5313. Accessed on 28/02/2021. Fontenelle, T. (ed.). 2003. Special issue on FrameNet and frame semantics. In: International Journal of Lexicography (16) 3:363-366. Gonzalez, F.J. 2004. Sistema de classificacao de esportes com base nos criterios: cooperacao, interacao com o adversario, ambiente, desempenho comparado e objetivos taticos da acao. Lecturas: Educacion Fisica y Deportes (10) 71. Souza, D.S. 2015. Jogada de letra: um estudo sobre colocacoes a luz da semântica de frames. Master’s dissertation. Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Sao Leopoldo.