We aim to automatically induce a PoS tagset for Italian by analysing the distributional behaviour of Italian words. To this end, we propose an algorithm that (a) extracts information from loosely labelled dependency structures that encode only basic and broadly accepted syntactic relations, namely Head/Dependent and the distinction of dependents into Argument vs. Adjunct, and (b) derives a possible set of word classes. The paper reports on some preliminary experiments carried out using the induced tagset in conjunction with state-of-the-art PoS taggers. The method proposed to design a proper tagset exploits little, if any, language-specific knowledge: hence it is in principle applicable to any language.

The DiaCORIS project aims at the construction of a diachronic corpus comprising written Italian texts produced between 1861 and 1945, extending the structure and the research possibilities of the synchronic 100-million word corpus CORIS/CODIS. A preliminary in depth study has been performed in order to design a representative and well balanced sample of the Italian language over a time period that contains all the main events of contemporary Italian history from the National Unification to the end of the Second World War. The paper describes in detail such design processes as the definition of the main subcorpora and their proportions, the type of documents inserted in each part of the corpus, the document annotation schema and the technological infrastructure designed to manage the corpus access as well as the web interface to corpus data.