In this article, we lay out the basic ideas and principles of the project Framing Situations in the Dutch Language. We provide our first results of data acquisition, together with the first data release. We introduce the notion of cross-lingual referential corpora. These corpora consist of texts that make reference to exactly the same incidents. The referential grounding allows us to analyze the framing of these incidents in different languages and across different texts. During the project, we will use the automatically generated data to study linguistic framing as a phenomenon, build framing resources such as lexicons and corpora. We expect to capture larger variation in framing compared to traditional approaches for building such resources. Our first data release, which contains structured data about a large number of incidents and reference texts, can be found at http://dutchframenet.nl/data-releases/.

In this paper, we introduce the task of using FrameNet to link structured information about real-world events to the conceptual frames used in texts describing these events. We show that frames made relevant by the knowledge of the real-world event can be captured by complementing standard lexicon-driven FrameNet annotations with frame annotations derived through pragmatic inference. We propose a two-layered annotation scheme with a ‘strict’ FrameNet-compatible lexical layer and a ‘loose’ layer capturing frames that are inferred from referential data.