We present here the initial stages of the construction of the DIADIta corpus, a diachronic corpus of Italian annotated for interactional pragmatic phenomena. First, we describe the annotation scheme, which is structured into four levels: speech acts (e.g., apology; threat), forms (e.g., discourse marker; expressive), pragmatic functions (which are speaker-oriented, e.g., mitigation; turn-taking), and pragmatic aims (which are interlocutor-oriented, e.g., attention-getting; request for agreement). Next, we discuss how the results of a first annotation exercise provide indications for refining the annotation procedure.

“Voices of the Great War” is the first large corpus of Italian historical texts dating back to the period of First World War. This corpus differs from other existing resources in several respects. First, from the linguistic point of view it gives account of the wide range of varieties in which Italian was articulated in that period, namely from a diastratic (educated vs. uneducated writers), diaphasic (low/informal vs. high/formal registers) and diatopic (regional varieties, dialects) points of view. From the historical perspective, through a collection of texts belonging to different genres it represents different views on the war and the various styles of narrating war events and experiences. The final corpus is balanced along various dimensions, corresponding to the textual genre, the language variety used, the author type and the typology of conveyed contents. The corpus is fully annotated with lemmas, part-of-speech, terminology, and named entities. Significant corpus samples representative of the different “voices” have also been enriched with meta-linguistic and syntactic information. The layer of syntactic annotation forms the first nucleus of an Italian historical treebank complying with the Universal Dependencies standard. The paper illustrates the final resource, the methodology and tools used to build it, and the Web Interface for navigating it.

The paper describes the multimodal enrichment of ItalWordNet action verbs’ entries by means of an automatic mapping with an ontology of action types instantiated by video scenes (ImagAct). The two resources present important differences as well as interesting complementary features, such that a mapping of these two resources can lead to a an enrichment of IWN, through the connection between synsets and videos apt to illustrate the meaning described by glosses. Here, we describe an approach inspired by ontology matching methods for the automatic mapping of ImagAct video scened onto ItalWordNet sense. The experiments described in the paper are conducted on Italian, but the same methodology can be extended to other languages for which WordNets have been created, since ImagAct is done also for English, Chinese and Spanish. This source of multimodal information can be exploited to design second language learning tools, as well as for language grounding in video action recognition and potentially for robotics.