Emanuele Pianta

Revising the wordnet domains hierarchy: semantics, coverage and balancing

The continuous expansion of the multilingual information society has led in recent years to a pressing demand for multilingual linguistic resources suitable to be used for different applications. n nIn this paper we present the WordNet Domains Hierarchy (WDH), a language-independent resource composed of 164, hierarchically organized, domain labels (e.g. Architecture, Sport, Medicine). Although WDH has been successfully applied to various Natural Language Processing tasks, the first available version presented some problems, mostly related to the lack of a clear semantics of the domain labels. Other correlated issues were the coverage and the balancing of the domains. We illustrate a new version of WDH addressing these problems by an explicit and systematic reference to the Dewey Decimal Classification. The new version of WDH has a better defined semantics and is applicable to a wider range of tasks.

Representing and accessing multilevel linguistic annotation using the MEANING format

We present an XML annotation format (MEANING Annotation Format, MAF) specifically designed to represent and integrate different levels of linguistic annotations and a tool that provides flexible access to them (MEANING Browser). We describe our experience in integrating linguistic annotations coming from different sources, and the solutions we adopted to implement efficient access to corpora annotated with the Meaning Format.

Evaluation of Natural Language and Speech Tools for Italian

The aim of the EVALITA Parsing Task (EPT) is at defining and extending Italian state-of-the-art parsing by encouraging the application of existing models and approaches, comparing paradigms and annotation formats. Therefore, in all the editions, held respectively in 2007, 2009 and 2011, the Task has been organized around two tracks, namely Dependency Parsing and Constituency Parsing, exploiting the same data sets made available by the organizers in two different formats. This paper describes the Dependency Parsing Task assuming an historical perspective, but mainly focussing on the last edition held in 2011. It presents and compares the resources exploited for development and testing, the participant systems and the results, showing also the improvement of resources and scores during the three editions of this contest.