ABSTRACT
We propose that qualitative physics can provide an important component of natural language semantics. Specifically, we describe how qualitative process theory can be recast in terms of frame semantics, as used in the Berkeley FrameNet project. This reformulation is important because it could allow the techniques of qualitative reasoning to be harnessed for natural language understanding and it expands the range of phenomena that can be described in NL semantics. We show that these ideas can account for a large percentage of a small corpus of explanatory text, and that they support the construction of QP models from such texts.
