Elisabetta Jezek

Senso Comune: A Collaborative Knowledge Resource for Italian

Senso Comune is an open knowledge base for the Italian language, available through a Web-based collaborative platform, whose construction is in progress. The resource integrates dictionary data coming from both users and legacy resources with an ontological backbone, which provides foundations for a formal characterization of lexical semantic structures (frames). A nucleus of basic Italian lemmas, which have been semantically analyzed and classified, is available for both online access and download. A restricted community of contributors is currently working on increasing the lexical coverage of the resource.

On parts-of-speech transcategorization

In this paper we investigate the linguistic phenomenon of transcategorization, that is, the categorial shift of a lexical item with no superficial marking, resulting from its employment in a new (morpho)syntactic environment. Our overall aim is to contribute to the description of transcategorization processes from a typological perspective and to highlight their synchronic consequences on the structure of the lexicon. We analyse paradigmatic instances of transcategorization from typologically different languages and discuss the notion of transcategorization with reference to related notions such as conversion, precategoriality, flexibility and polifunctionality. We argue that transcategorization, understood as a diachronic shift from a source to a target category, is more characteristic of languages with clear-cut parts-of-speech distinctions, such as fusional languages. By contrast, isolating languages, where lexical categories are not clearly marked formally, are better characterized as languages with precategorial lexemes. Our main goal is to stress the role that transcategorization plays in shaping the parts-of-speech systems of languages and to highlight its relevance in parts-of-speech theories and models.

An open knowledge base for Italian language in a collaborative perspective

In this paper, we describe the architecture and collaborative approach adopted for the development of Senso Comune (SC), an open knowledge base for the Italian language that combines lexicographic, linguistic, ontological and textual data in a web-based collaborative platform. Senso Comune aims at integrating lexicographic data from users and legacy resources with a formally characterized ontology grounded on lexical semantic structures. Senso Comune was conceived as a linguistic knowledge base rather than a dictionary. It is actually based on a conceptual apparatus that is unusual in typical linguistic resources:, each sense is mapped to ontological categories, and is associated with semantic frames. A wiki provides a collaborative platform for editing a basic lexicon of Italian with different access and annotation privileges that dynamically enables crowd-sourced annotations. Senso Comune proposes different levels of interrelated representation layers that differently exploit collaborative annotation.

Opposition Relations among Verb Frames

In this paper we propose a scheme for annotating opposition relations among verb frames in lexical resources. The scheme is tested on the T-PAS resource, an inventory of typed predicate argument structures for Italian, conceived for both linguistic research and computational tasks. After discussing opposition relations from a linguistic point of view and listing the tags we decided to use, we report the results of the experiment we performed to test the annotation scheme, in terms of interannotation agreement and linguistic analysis of annotated data.

Corpus Patterns for Semantic Processing

This tutorial presents a corpus-driven, pattern-based empirical approach to meaning representation and computation. Patterns in text are everywhere, but techniques for identifying and processing them are still rudimentary. Patterns are not merely syntactic but syntagmatic: each pattern identifies a lexico-semantic clause structure consisting of a predicator (verb or predicative adjective) together with open-ended lexical sets of collocates in different clause roles (subject, object, prepositional argument, etc.). If NLP is to make progress in identifying and processing text meaning, pattern recognition and collocational analysis will play an essential role, because:

Senso Comune as a Knowledge Base of Italian language: The Resource and its Development

Senso Comune is a linguistic knowledge base for the Italian Language, which accommodates the content of a legacy dictionary in a rich formal model. The model is implemented in a platform which allows a community of contributors to enrich the resource. We provide here an overview of the main project features, including the lexical-ontology model, the process of sense classification, and the annotation of meaning definitions (glosses) and lexicographic examples. Also, we will illustrate the latest work of alignment with MultiWordNet, to illustrate the methodologies that have been experimented with, to share some preliminary result, and to highlight some remarkable findings about the semantic coverage of the two resources.