The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the project was to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus. Applying the Berkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English.

Background and Aims: Alcohol use during pregnancy remains an important risk factor for adverse birth outcomes, but little is known regarding how alcohol prices affect pregnancy outcomes on the population level. We assess the associations between decreased alcohol prices with birth outcomes and abortions.Design: Using national registers, we used interrupted time-series modelling to compare outcomes of pregnancies conceived before and after a tax cut, resulting in 33% mean decrease of off-premise alcohol prices on 1 March 2004. We also addressed possible heterogeneity of the associations by maternal age and household income.Setting: Finland.Participants: All registered pregnancies starting 2 years before and 1 year after the alcohol price cut (analysis sample consisted of 169 735 live births and 32 441 abortions). Measurements:The outcomes were birth weight, gestational age, the probability of low birth weight (< 2500 g at birth), preterm birth (< 37 weeks of gestation), any congenital malformations and share of registered abortions of pregnancies.Findings: On the population level, lowered alcohol prices were associated with an increase in abortions immediately after the price cut [+0.84 percentage points; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.2, 1.4]. For birth outcomes, negative associations were observed among women in the lowest income quintile; for example, increased probabilities of low birth weight (+1.5 percentage points; 95% CI = 0.4, 2.6) and preterm birth (+1.98 percentage points; 95% CI = 0.8, 3.2). All changes were strongest immediately after the price cut and attenuated during the course of the following year.Conclusions: Lowered alcohol prices in Finland were associated with a short-term increase in adverse birth outcomes among low-income mothers and an overall increase in abortions.

Background Low birth weight (BW) is associated with lower cognitive functioning, but less is known of these associations across the full range of the BW distribution and its components. We analyzed how BW, birth length (BL) and birth ponderal index (BPI, kg/m3) are associated with school performance and how childhood family social position modifies these associations. Methods Medical birth records of all Finnish children born in 1987–1997 were linked to school performance records at 16 years of age (N = 642,425). We used population averaged and within-siblings fixed-effects linear regression models. Results BL showed a linear and BW a curvilinear association with school performance whereas for BPI the association was weak. The strongest association was found for BL explaining 0.08% of the variation in school performance in boys and 0.14% in girls. Demographic, gestational and social factors partly explained these associations. Similar but weaker associations were found within sibships. The association of BL with school performance was stronger at lower levels of family social position. Conclusion BL shows a linear association with school performance and can explain more school performance variation than BW. At the population level, BL can offer useful information on intrauterine environmental factors relevant for cognitive performance. Impact Birth length is linearly associated with school performance in late adolescence and explains a larger proportion of school performance variation than birth weight. The association between birth length and school performance is stronger in families with lower socio-economic position. At the population level, birth length can offer information on the intrauterine environment relevant for later cognitive performance.

The article details the formational process of the FinnTransFrame corpus, a part of the FinnFrameNet project. In addition to a large annotated frame semantic corpus of natural language examples, the project created a separate corpus of examples translated from English to Finnish. The research question when creating the FinnTransFrame corpus was to see to what extent the various frames of the original Berkeley FrameNet transfer into Finnish in translated examples, i.e. what are the main problems and how can they be categorized? A variety of Berkeley FrameNet examples were chosen from different frames and then translated by professionals. The FinnFrameNet annotation team checked all the examples and their translations to see if the frames remained intact in translation. Problematic examples were tagged according to the type of the encountered problem, with the main focus on the type of fine-grained mismatches of meaning that caused frame changes even when the translation was the best possible one. The frame-loss amounted to 4.2% of the 88,209 relevant example sentences. Filtering out sentences & Krister Lindén

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