The Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon: Modeling Constructional Inheritance, Frame Evocation and Constraints in FrameNet Brasil

Adrieli Laviola, Ludmila Lage, Natália Duarte Marção, Tatiane Tavares, Vânia Almeida, Ely Edison Matos, Tiago Torrent

Abstract: FrameNet Brasil comprises two major resources: a Lexicon, expanded from the Berkeley FrameNet, and a Constructicon, whose development led to considerable changes in the FrameNet standards for data structure. This paper reports on the development of the Brazilian Portuguese Constructicon, focusing on the changes made to the FrameNet Brasil database structure so as to model (a) Inheritance relations between constructions, (b) Evoking relations between constructions and frames, and (c) Constraints applying to the Construct Elements. As a result of such changes, FrameNet Brasil integrates the two resources into one single database, yielding annotations that are able to provide a comprehensive account of both formal and semantic aspects of sentences.