Francesca Frontini


2022

pdf
Language Technologies for the Creation of Multilingual Terminologies. Lessons Learned from the SSHOC Project
Federica Gamba | Francesca Frontini | Daan Broeder | Monica Monachini
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper is framed in the context of the SSHOC project and aims at exploring how Language Technologies can help in promoting and facilitating multilingualism in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Although most SSH researchers produce culturally and societally relevant work in their local languages, metadata and vocabularies used in the SSH domain to describe and index research data are currently mostly in English. We thus investigate Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation approaches in view of providing resources and tools to foster multilingual access and discovery to SSH content across different languages. As case studies, we create and deliver as freely, openly available data a set of multilingual metadata concepts and an automatically extracted multilingual Data Stewardship terminology. The two case studies allow as well to evaluate performances of state-of-the-art tools and to derive a set of recommendations as to how best apply them. Although not adapted to the specific domain, the employed tools prove to be a valid asset to translation tasks. Nonetheless, validation of results by domain experts proficient in the language is an unavoidable phase of the whole workflow.

pdf
Making Italian Parliamentary Records Machine-Actionable: the Construction of the ParlaMint-IT corpus
Tommaso Agnoloni | Roberto Bartolini | Francesca Frontini | Simonetta Montemagni | Carlo Marchetti | Valeria Quochi | Manuela Ruisi | Giulia Venturi
Proceedings of the Workshop ParlaCLARIN III within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes the process of acquisition, cleaning, interpretation, coding and linguistic annotation of a collection of parliamentary debates from the Senate of the Italian Republic covering the COVID-19 period and a former period for reference and comparison according to the CLARIN ParlaMint guidelines and prescriptions. The corpus contains 1199 sessions and 79,373 speeches, for a total of about 31 million words and was encoded according to the ParlaCLARIN TEI XML format, as well as in CoNLL-UD format. It includes extensive metadata about the speakers, the sessions, the political parties and Parliamentary groups. As required by the ParlaMint initiative, the corpus was also linguistically annotated for sentences, tokens, POS tags, lemmas and dependency syntax according to the universal dependencies guidelines. Named entity classification was also included. All linguistic annotation was performed automatically using state-of-the-art NLP technology with no manual revision. The Italian dataset is freely available as part of the larger ParlaMint 2.1 corpus deposited and archived in CLARIN repository together with all other national corpora. It is also available for direct analysis and inspection via various CLARIN services and has already been used both for research and educational purposes.

2020

pdf
Building a domain-specific bilingual lexicon resource with Sketchengine and Lexonomy: Taking Ownership of the Issues
Zaida Bartolomé-Díaz | Francesca Frontini
Proceedings of the 2020 Globalex Workshop on Linked Lexicography

Thanks to new technologies, the elaboration of specialized bilingual dictionaries can be made faster and more standardized, offering not only a dictionary of equivalents, but also the representation of a conceptual field. Nevertheless, in view of these new tools and services, some of which are offered free of charge by European institutions, it is necessary to question the viability of their use by a lambda user and the previous knowledge required for such use, as well as the possible problems they may encounter. In our communication we show a series of possible difficulties, as well as a methodological proposal and some solutions, by presenting an extract of a French-Spanish bilingual dictionary for the domain of architecture. The extract in question is a sample of about 30 terms created with the Lexonomy dictionary editor (Měchura 2017).

2018

pdf
One Language to rule them all: modelling Morphological Patterns in a Large Scale Italian Lexicon with SWRL
Fahad Khan | Andrea Bellandi | Francesca Frontini | Monica Monachini
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

pdf
Situating Word Senses in their Historical Context with Linked Data
Fahad Khan | Jack Bowers | Francesca Frontini
IWCS 2017 — 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics — Short papers

pdf
Proceedings of Language, Ontology, Terminology and Knowledge Structures Workshop (LOTKS 2017)
Francesca Frontini | Larisa Grčić Simeunović | Špela Vintar | Anas Fahad Khan | Artemis Parvisi
Proceedings of Language, Ontology, Terminology and Knowledge Structures Workshop (LOTKS 2017)

2016

pdf
Al Qamus al Muhit, a Medieval Arabic Lexicon in LMF
Ouafae Nahli | Francesca Frontini | Monica Monachini | Fahad Khan | Arsalan Zarghili | Mustapha Khalfi
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper describes the conversion into LMF, a standard lexicographic digital format of ‘al-qāmūs al-muḥīṭ, a Medieval Arabic lexicon. The lexicon is first described, then all the steps required for the conversion are illustrated. The work is will produce a useful lexicographic resource for Arabic NLP, but is also interesting per se, to study the implications of adapting the LMF model to the Arabic language. Some reflections are offered as to the status of roots with respect to previously suggested representations. In particular, roots are, in our opinion are to be not treated as lexical entries, but modeled as lexical metadata for classifying and identifying lexical entries. In this manner, each root connects all entries that are derived from it.

pdf
LREC as a Graph: People and Resources in a Network
Riccardo Del Gratta | Francesca Frontini | Monica Monachini | Gabriella Pardelli | Irene Russo | Roberto Bartolini | Fahad Khan | Claudia Soria | Nicoletta Calzolari
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This proposal describes a new way to visualise resources in the LREMap, a community-built repository of language resource descriptions and uses. The LREMap is represented as a force-directed graph, where resources, papers and authors are nodes. The analysis of the visual representation of the underlying graph is used to study how the community gathers around LRs and how LRs are used in research.

2015

pdf
Une mesure d’intérêt à base de surreprésentation pour l’extraction des motifs syntaxiques stylistiques
Mohamed Amine Boukhaled | Francesca Frontini | Jean-Gabriel Ganascia
Actes de la 22e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Articles courts

Dans cette contribution, nous présentons une étude sur la stylistique computationnelle des textes de la littérature classiques française fondée sur une approche conduite par données, où la découverte des motifs linguistiques intéressants se fait sans aucune connaissance préalable. Nous proposons une mesure objective capable de capturer et d’extraire des motifs syntaxiques stylistiques significatifs à partir d’un œuvre d’un auteur donné. Notre hypothèse de travail est fondée sur le fait que les motifs syntaxiques les plus pertinents devraient refléter de manière significative le choix stylistique de l’auteur, et donc ils doivent présenter une sorte de comportement de surreprésentation contrôlé par les objectifs de l’auteur. Les résultats analysés montrent l’efficacité dans l’extraction de motifs syntaxiques intéressants dans le texte littéraire français classique, et semblent particulièrement prometteurs pour les analyses de ce type particulier de texte.

pdf
Using Ontologies to Model Polysemy in Lexical Resources
Fahad Khan | Francesca Frontini
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Language and Ontologies

2014

pdf
The IMAGACT Visual Ontology. An Extendable Multilingual Infrastructure for the representation of lexical encoding of Action
Massimo Moneglia | Susan Brown | Francesca Frontini | Gloria Gagliardi | Fahad Khan | Monica Monachini | Alessandro Panunzi
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

Action verbs have many meanings, covering actions in different ontological types. Moreover, each language categorizes action in its own way. One verb can refer to many different actions and one action can be identified by more than one verb. The range of variations within and across languages is largely unknown, causing trouble for natural language processing tasks. IMAGACT is a corpus-based ontology of action concepts, derived from English and Italian spontaneous speech corpora, which makes use of the universal language of images to identify the different action types extended by verbs referring to action in English, Italian, Chinese and Spanish. This paper presents the infrastructure and the various linguistic information the user can derive from it. IMAGACT makes explicit the variation of meaning of action verbs within one language and allows comparisons of verb variations within and across languages. Because the action concepts are represented with videos, extension into new languages beyond those presently implemented in IMAGACT is done using competence-based judgments by mother-tongue informants without intense lexicographic work involving underdetermined semantic description

pdf
Polysemy Index for Nouns: an Experiment on Italian using the PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS Lexical Database
Francesca Frontini | Valeria Quochi | Sebastian Padó | Monica Monachini | Jason Utt
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

An experiment is presented to induce a set of polysemous basic type alternations (such as Animal-Food, or Building-Institution) by deriving them from the sense alternations found in an existing lexical resource. The paper builds on previous work and applies those results to the Italian lexicon PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS. The new results show how the set of frequent type alternations that can be induced from the lexicon is partly different from the set of polysemy relations selected and explicitely applied by lexicographers when building it. The analysis of mismatches shows that frequent type alternations do not always correpond to prototypical polysemy relations, nevertheless the proposed methodology represents a useful tool offered to lexicographers to systematically check for possible gaps in their resource.

pdf
Presenting a system of human-machine interaction for performing map tasks.
Gabriele Pallotti | Francesca Frontini | Fabio Affè | Monica Monachini | Stefania Ferrari
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

A system for human machine interaction is presented, that offers second language learners of Italian the possibility of assessing their competence by performing a map task, namely by guiding the a virtual follower through a map with written instructions in natural language. The underlying natural language processing algorithm is described, and the map authoring infrastructure is presented.

pdf
Generating Polarity Lexicons with WordNet propagation in 5 languages
Isa Maks | Ruben Izquierdo | Francesca Frontini | Rodrigo Agerri | Piek Vossen | Andoni Azpeitia
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

In this paper we focus on the creation of general-purpose (as opposed to domain-specific) polarity lexicons in five languages: French, Italian, Dutch, English and Spanish using WordNet propagation. WordNet propagation is a commonly used method to generate these lexicons as it gives high coverage of general purpose language and the semantically rich WordNets where concepts are organised in synonym , antonym and hyperonym/hyponym structures seem to be well suited to the identification of positive and negative words. However, WordNets of different languages may vary in many ways such as the way they are compiled, the number of synsets, number of synonyms and number of semantic relations they include. In this study we investigate whether this variability translates into differences of performance when these WordNets are used for polarity propagation. Although many variants of the propagation method are developed for English, little is known about how they perform with WordNets of other languages. We implemented a propagation algorithm and designed a method to obtain seed lists similar with respect to quality and size, for each of the five languages. We evaluated the results against gold standards also developed according to a common method in order to achieve as less variance as possible between the different languages.

2013

pdf
Generative Lexicon Theory and Linguistic Linked Open Data
Fahad Khan | Francesca Frontini | Riccardo Del Gratta | Monica Monachini | Valeria Quochi
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon (GL2013)

pdf
Disambiguation of Basic Action Types through Nouns’ Telic Qualia
Irene Russo | Francesca Frontini | Irene De Felice | Fahad Khan | Monica Monachini
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon (GL2013)

pdf
Towards the establishment of a linguistic linked data network for Italian
Roberto Bartolini | Riccardo Del Gratta | Francesca Frontini
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2013): Representing and linking lexicons, terminologies and other language data

2012

pdf
Customizable SCF Acquisition in Italian
Tommaso Caselli | Francesco Rubino | Francesca Frontini | Irene Russo | Valeria Quochi
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Lexica of predicate-argument structures constitute a useful tool for several tasks in NLP. This paper describes a web-service system for automatic acquisition of verb subcategorization frames (SCFs) from parsed data in Italian. The system acquires SCFs in an unsupervised manner. We created two gold standards for the evaluation of the system, the first by mixing together information from two lexica (one manually created and the second automatically acquired) and manual exploration of corpus data and the other annotating data extracted from a specialized corpus (environmental domain). Data filtering is accomplished by means of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE). The evaluation phase has allowed us to identify the best empirical MLE threshold for the creation of a lexicon (P=0.653, R=0.557, F1=0.601). In addition to this, we assigned to the extracted entries of the lexicon a confidence score based on the relative frequency and evaluated the extractor on domain specific data. The confidence score will allow the final user to easily select the entries of the lexicon in terms of their reliability: one of the most interesting feature of this work is the possibility the final users have to customize the results of the SCF extractor, obtaining different SCF lexica in terms of size and accuracy.

pdf
The Language Library: supporting community effort for collective resource production
Riccardo Del Gratta | Francesca Frontini | Francesco Rubino | Irene Russo | Nicoletta Calzolari
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Relations among phenomena at different linguistic levels are at the essence of language properties but today we focus mostly on one specific linguistic layer at a time, without (having the possibility of) paying attention to the relations among the different layers. At the same time our efforts are too much scattered without much possibility of exploiting other people's achievements. To address the complexities hidden in multilayer interrelations even small amounts of processed data can be useful, improving the performance of complex systems. Exploiting the current trend towards sharing we want to initiate a collective movement that works towards creating synergies and harmonisation among different annotation efforts that are now dispersed. In this paper we present the general architecture of the Language Library, an initiative which is conceived as a facility for gathering and making available through simple functionalities the linguistic knowledge the field is able to produce, putting in place new ways of collaboration within the LRT community. In order to reach this goal, a first population round of the Language Library has started around a core of parallel/comparable texts that have been annotated by several contributors submitting a paper for LREC2012. The Language Library has also an ancillary aim related to language documentation and archiving and it is conceived as a theory-neutral space which allows for several language processing philosophies to coexist.

pdf
The IMAGACT Cross-linguistic Ontology of Action. A new infrastructure for natural language disambiguation
Massimo Moneglia | Monica Monachini | Omar Calabrese | Alessandro Panunzi | Francesca Frontini | Gloria Gagliardi | Irene Russo
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

Action verbs, which are highly frequent in speech, cause disambiguation problems that are relevant to Language Technologies. This is a consequence of the peculiar way each natural language categorizes Action i.e. it is a consequence of semantic factors. Action verbs are frequently “general”, since they extend productively to actions belonging to different ontological types. Moreover, each language categorizes action in its own way and therefore the cross-linguistic reference to everyday activities is puzzling. This paper briefly sketches the IMAGACT project, which aims at setting up a cross-linguistic Ontology of Action for grounding disambiguation tasks in this crucial area of the lexicon. The project derives information on the actual variation of action verbs in English and Italian from spontaneous speech corpora, where references to action are high in frequency. Crucially it makes use of the universal language of images to identify action types, avoiding the underdeterminacy of semantic definitions. Action concept entries are implemented as prototypic scenes; this will make it easier to extend the Ontology to other languages.

pdf
Integrating NLP Tools in a Distributed Environment: A Case Study Chaining a Tagger with a Dependency Parser
Francesco Rubino | Francesca Frontini | Valeria Quochi
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

The present paper tackles the issue of PoS tag conversion within the framework of a distributed web service platform for the automatic creation of language resources. PoS tagging is now considered a """"solved problem""""; yet, because of the differences in the tagsets, interchange of the various PoS tagger available is still hampered. In this paper we describe the implementation of a pos-tagged-corpus converter, which is needed for chaining together in a workflow the Freeling PoS tagger for Italian and the DESR dependency parser, given that these two tools have been developed independently. The conversion problems experienced during the implementation, related to the properties of the different tagsets and of tagset conversion in general, are discussed together with the heuristics implemented in the attempt to solve them. Finally, the converter is evaluated by assessing the impact of conversion on the performance of the dependency parser. From this we learn that in most cases parsing errors are due to actual tagging errors, and not to conversion itself. Besides, information on accuracy loss is an important feature in a distributed environment of (NLP) services, where users need to decide which services best suit their needs.

pdf
The META-SHARE Metadata Schema for the Description of Language Resources
Maria Gavrilidou | Penny Labropoulou | Elina Desipri | Stelios Piperidis | Haris Papageorgiou | Monica Monachini | Francesca Frontini | Thierry Declerck | Gil Francopoulo | Victoria Arranz | Valerie Mapelli
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

This paper presents a metadata model for the description of language resources proposed in the framework of the META-SHARE infrastructure, aiming to cover both datasets and tools/technologies used for their processing. It places the model in the overall framework of metadata models, describes the basic principles and features of the model, elaborates on the distinction between minimal and maximal versions thereof, briefly presents the integrated environment supporting the LRs description and search and retrieval processes and concludes with work to be done in the future for the improvement of the model.

pdf
Verb interpretation for basic action types: annotation, ontology induction and creation of prototypical scenes
Francesca Frontini | Irene De Felice | Fahad Khan | Irene Russo | Monica Monachini | Gloria Gagliardi | Alessandro Panunzi
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon

pdf
A MWE Acquisition and Lexicon Builder Web Service
Valeria Quochi | Francesca Frontini | Francesco Rubino
Proceedings of COLING 2012

2011

pdf
A Metadata Schema for the Description of Language Resources (LRs)
Maria Gavrilidou | Penny Labropoulou | Stelios Piperidis | Monica Monachini | Francesca Frontini | Gil Francopoulo | Victoria Arranz | Valérie Mapelli
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm

pdf
The Language Library: Many Layers, More Knowledge
Nicoletta Calzolari | Riccardo Del Gratta | Francesca Frontini | Irene Russo
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and Services in the Sharing Paradigm