Facet Analysis and Semantic Frames

Various fields, each with its own theories, techniques, and tools, are concerned with identifying and representing the conceptual structure of specific knowledge domains. This paper compares facet analysis, an analytic technique coming out of knowledge organization (especially as undertaken by members of the Classification Research Group (CRG)), with semantic frame analysis, an analytic technique coming out of lexical semantics (especially as undertaken by the developers of FrameNet). The investigation addresses three questions: 1) how do CRG-style facet analysis and semantic frame analysis characterize the conceptual structures that they identify?; 2) how similar are the techniques they use?; and, 3) how similar are the conceptual structures they produce? Facet analysis is concerned with the logical categories underlying the terminology of an entire field, while semantic frame analysis is concerned with the participant-and-prop structure manifest in sentences about a type of situation or event. When their scope of application is similar, as, for example, in the areas of the performing arts or education, the resulting facets and semantic frame elements often bear striking resemblance, without being the same; facets are more often expressed as semantic types, while frame elements are more often expressed as roles.