In this paper Semantic Press, a tool for the automatic press review, is introduced. It is based on Text Mining technologies and is tailored to meet the needs of the eGovernment and eParticipation communities. First, a general description of the application demands emerging from the eParticipation and eGovernment sectors is offered. Then, an introduction to the framework of the automatic analysis and classification of newspaper content is provided, together with a description of the technologies underlying it.

EVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative devoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Processing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants’ systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tasks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), Parsing (organised by the University of Torino), Word Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and shared evaluation practices is a crucial step towards the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such goals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages.

In this paper we present LeXFlow, a web application framework where lexicons already expressed in standardised format semi-automatically interact by reciprocally enriching themselves. LeXFlow is intended for, on the one hand, paving the way to the development of dynamic multi-source lexicons; and on the other, for fostering the adoption of standards. Borrowing from techniques used in the domain of document workflows, we model the activity of lexicon management as a particular case of workflow instance, where lexical entries move across agents and become dynamically updated. To this end, we have designed a lexical flow (LF) corresponding to the scenario where an entry of a lexicon A becomes enriched via basically two steps. First, by virtue of being mapped onto a corresponding entry belonging to a lexicon B, the entry(LA) inherits the semantic relations available in lexicon B. Second, by resorting to an automatic application that acquires information about semantic relations from corpora, the relations acquired are integrated into the entry and proposed to the human encoder. As a result of the lexical flow, in addition, for each starting lexical entry(LA) mapped onto a corresponding entry(LB) the flow produces a new entry representing the merging of the original two.

The paper reports on the results of the exploitation of two Italian lexicons (ItalWordNet and SIMPLE-CLIPS) in an Open-Domain Question Answering application for Italian. The intent is to analyse the behavior of the lexicons in application in order to understand what are their limits and points of strength. The final aim of the paper is contributing to the debate about usefulness of computational lexicons in NLP, by providing evidence from the point of view of a particular application.

This paper presents a case study concerning the challenges and requirements posed by next generation language resources, realized as an overall model of open, distributed and collaborative language infrastructure. If a sort of “new paradigm” for language resource sharing is required, we think that the emerging and still evolving technology connected to Grid computing is a very interesting and suitable one for a concrete realization of this vision. Given the current limitations of Grid computing, it is very important to test the new environment on basic language analysis tools, in order to get the feeling of what are the potentialities and possible limitations connected to its use in NLP. For this reason, we have done some experiments on a module of the Linguistic Miner, i.e. the extraction of linguistic patterns from restricted domain corpora. The Grid environment has produced the expected results (reduction of the processing time, huge storage capacity, data redundancy) without any additional cost for the final user.