Discourse phenomena play a major role in text processing tasks. However, so far relatively little study has been devoted to the relevance of discourse phenomena for inference. Therefore, an experimental study was carried out to assess the relevance of anaphora and coreference for Textual Entailment (TE), a prominent inference framework. First, the annotation of anaphoric and coreferential links in the RTE-5 Search data set was performed according to a specifically designed annotation scheme. As a result, a new data set was created where all anaphora and coreference instances in the entailing sentences which are relevant to the entailment judgment are solved and annotated.. A by-product of the annotation is a new “augmented” data set, where all the referring expressions which need to be resolved in the entailing sentences are replaced by explicit expressions. Starting from the final output of the annotation, the actual impact of discourse phenomena on inference engines was investigated, identifying the kind of operations that the systems need to apply to address discourse phenomena and trying to find direct mappings between these operation and annotation types.

This document reports the process of extending MorphoPro for Venetan, a lesser-used language spoken in the Nort-Eastern part of Italy. MorphoPro is the morphological component of TextPro, a suite of tools oriented towards a number of NLP tasks. In order to extend this component to Venetan, we developed a declarative representation of the morphological knowledge necessary to analyze and synthesize Venetan words. This task was challenging for several reasons, which are common to a number of lesser-used languages: although Venetan is widely used as an oral language in everyday life, its written usage is very limited; efforts for defining a standard orthography and grammar are very recent and not well established; despite recent attempts to propose a unified orthography, no Venetan standard is widely used. Besides, there are different geographical varieties and it is strongly influenced by Italian.

Automated extraction of ontological knowledge from text corpora is a relevant task in Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding hypernyms for relevant concepts in a specific domain (e.g. Optical Recording) in the context of a concrete and challenging application scenario (patent processing). To this end information available on the Web is exploited. The extraction method includes four mains steps. Firstly, the Google search engine is exploited to retrieve possible instances of isa-patterns reported in the literature. Then, the returned snippets are filtered on the basis of lexico-syntactic criteria (e.g. the candidate hypernym must be expressed as a noun phrase without complex modifiers). In a further filtering step, only candidate hypernyms compatible with the target domain are kept. Finally a candidate ranking mechanism is applied to select one hypernym as output of the algorithm. The extraction method was evaluated on 100 concepts of the Optical Recording domain. Moreover, the reliability of isa-patterns reported in the literature as predictors of isa-relations was assessed by manually evaluating the template instances remaining after lexico-syntactic filtering, for 3 concepts of the same domain. While more extensive testing is needed the method appears promising especially for its portability across different domains.

We present TextPro, a suite of modular Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for analysis of Italian and English texts. The suite has been designed so as to integrate and reuse state of the art NLP components developed by researchers at FBK. The current version of the tool suite provides functions ranging from tokenization to chunking and Named Entity Recognition (NER). The system’s architecture is organized as a pipeline of processors wherein each stage accepts data from an initial input or from an output of a previous stage, executes a specific task, and sends the resulting data to the next stage, or to the output of the pipeline. TextPro performed the best on the task of Italian NER and Italian PoS Tagging at EVALITA 2007. When tested on a number of other standard English benchmarks, TextPro confirms that it performs as state of the art system. Distributions for Linux, Solaris and Windows are available, for both research and commercial purposes. A web-service version of the system is under development.

We describe an automatic projection algorithm for transferring frame-semantic information from English to Italian texts as a first sep towards the creation of Italian FrameNet. Given an English text with frame information and its Italian translation, we project the annotation in four steps: first the Italian text is parsed, then English-Italian alignment is automatically carried out at word level, then we extract the semantic head for every annotated constituent on the English corpus side and finally we project annotation from English to Italian using aligned semantic heads as bridge. With our work, we point out typical features of the Italian language as regards frame-semantic annotation, in particular we describe peculiarities of Italian that at the moment make the projection task more difficult than in the above-mentioned examples. Besides, we created a gold standard with 987 manually annotated sentences to evaluate the algorithm.

In this paper we present work in progress for the creation of the Italian Content Annotation Bank (I-CAB), a corpus of Italian news annotated with semantic information at different levels. The first level is represented by temporal expressions, the second level is represented by different types of entities (i.e. person, organizations, locations and geo-political entities), and the third level is represented by relations between entities (e.g. the affiliation relation connecting a person to an organization). So far I-CAB has been manually annotated with temporal expressions, person entities and organization entities. As we intend I-CAB to become a benchmark for various automatic Information Extraction tasks, we followed a policy of reusing already available markup languages. In particular, we adopted the annotation schemes developed for the ACE Entity Detection and Time Expressions Recognition and Normalization tasks. As the ACE guidelines have originally been developed for English, part of the effort consisted in adapting them to the specific morpho-syntactic features of Italian. Finally, we have extended them to include a wider range of entities, such as conjunctions.