In this paper, a pedagogical application of NooJ to the teaching and learning of Spanish as a foreign language is presented, which is directed to a specific addressee: learners whose mother tongue is Italian. The category ‘adjective’ has been chosen on account of its lower frequency of occurrence in texts written in Spanish, and particularly in the Argentine Rioplatense variety, and with the aim of developing strategies to increase its use. In addition, the features that the adjective shares with other grammatical categories render it extremely productive and provide elements that enrich the learners’ proficiency. The reference corpus contains the front pages of the Argentinian newspaper Clarín related to an emblematic historical moment, whose starting point is 24 March 1976, when a military coup began, and covers a thirty year period until 24 March 2006. It can be seen how the term desaparecido emerges with all its cultural and social charge, providing a context which allows an approach to Rioplatense Spanish from a more comprehensive perspective. Finally, a pedagogical proposal accounting for the application of the NooJ platform in language teaching is included.

This paper presents an on-going Natural Language Processing (NLP) research based on Lexicon-Grammar (LG) and aimed at improving knowledge management of Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. We intend to demonstrate how our language formalization technique can be applied for both processing and populating a domain ontology. We also use NLP techniques for text extraction and mining to fill information gaps and improve access to cultural resources. The Linguistic Resources (LRs, i.e. electronic dictionaries) we built can be used in the structuring of effective Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs). In order to apply to Parts of Speech (POS) the classes and properties defined by the Conseil Interational des Musees (CIDOC) Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), we use Finite State Transducers/Automata (FSTs/FSA) and their variables built in the form of graphs. FSTs/FSA are also used for analysing corpora in order to retrieve recursive sentence structures, in which combinatorial and semantic constraints identify properties and denote relationship. Besides, FSTs/FSA are also used to match our electronic dictionary entries (ALUs, or Atomic Linguistic Units) to RDF subject, object and predicate (SKOS Core Vocabulary). This matching of linguistic data to RDF and their translation into SPARQL/SERQL path expressions allows the use ALUs to process natural-language queries.