The paper introduces the IMPAQTS corpus of Italian political discourse, a multimodal corpus of around 2.65 million tokens including 1,500 speeches uttered by 150 prominent politicians spanning from 1946 to 2023. Covering the entire history of the Italian Republic, the collection exhibits a non-homogeneous consistency that progressively increases in quantity towards the present. The corpus is balanced according to textual and socio-linguistic criteria and includes different types of speeches. The sociolinguistic features of the speakers are carefully considered to ensure representation of Republican Italian politicians. For each speaker, the corpus contains 4 parliamentary speeches, 2 rallies, 1 party assembly, and 3 statements (in person or broadcasted). Parliamentary speeches therefore constitute the largest section of the corpus (40% of the total), enabling direct comparison with other types of political speeches. The collection procedure, including details relevant to the transcription protocols, and the processing pipeline are described. The corpus has been pragmatically annotated to include information about the implicitly conveyed questionable contents, paired with their explicit paraphrasis, providing the largest Italian collection of ecologic examples of linguistic implicit strategies. The adopted ontology of linguistic implicitness and the fine-grained annotation scheme are presented in detail.

This paper describes a method to measure the lexical gap of action verbs in Italian and English by using the IMAGACT ontology of action. The fine-grained categorization of action concepts of the data source allowed to have wide overview of the relation between concepts in the two languages. The calculated lexical gap for both English and Italian is about 30% of the action concepts, much higher than previous results. Beyond this general numbers a deeper analysis has been performed in order to evaluate the impact that lexical gaps can have on translation. In particular a distinction has been made between the cases in which the presence of a lexical gap affects translation correctness and completeness at a semantic level. The results highlight a high percentage of concepts that can be considered hard to translate (about 18% from English to Italian and 20% from Italian to English) and confirms that action verbs are a critical lexical class for translation tasks.

This paper introduces the RIDIRE-CPI, an open source tool for the building of web corpora with a specific design through a targeted crawling strategy. The tool has been developed within the RIDIRE Project, which aims at creating a 2 billion word balanced web corpus for Italian. RIDIRE-CPI architecture integrates existing open source tools as well as modules developed specifically within the RIDIRE project. It consists of various components: a robust crawler (Heritrix), a user friendly web interface, several conversion and cleaning tools, an anti-duplicate filter, a language guesser, and a PoS tagger. The RIDIRE-CPI user-friendly interface is specifically intended for allowing collaborative work performance by users with low skills in web technology and text processing. Moreover, RIDIRE-CPI integrates a validation interface dedicated to the evaluation of the targeted crawling. Through the content selection, metadata assignment, and validation procedures, the RIDIRE-CPI allows the gathering of linguistic data with a supervised strategy that leads to a higher level of control of the corpus contents. The modular architecture of the infrastructure and its open-source distribution will assure the reusability of the tool for other corpus building initiatives.