In this contribution, we show LexO, a user-friendly web collaborative editor of lexical resources based on the lemon model. LexO has been developed in the context of Digital Humanities projects, in which a key point in the design of an editor was the ease of use by lexicographers with no skill in Linked Data or Semantic Web technologies. Though the tool already allows creating a lemon lexicon from scratch and lets a team of users work on it collaboratively, many developments are possible. The involvement of the LLOD community appears now crucial both to find new users and application fields where to test it, and, even more importantly, to understand in which way it should evolve.

In the last few years the amount of manuscripts digitized and made available on the Web has been constantly increasing. However, there is still a considarable lack of results concerning both the explicitation of their content and the tools developed to make it available. The objective of the Clavius on the Web project is to develop a Web platform exposing a selection of Christophorus Clavius letters along with three different levels of analysis: linguistic, lexical and semantic. The multilayered annotation of the corpus involves a XML-TEI encoding followed by a tokenization step where each token is univocally identified through a CTS urn notation and then associated to a part-of-speech and a lemma. The text is lexically and semantically annotated on the basis of a lexicon and a domain ontology, the former structuring the most relevant terms occurring in the text and the latter representing the domain entities of interest (e.g. people, places, etc.). Moreover, each entity is connected to linked and non linked resources, including DBpedia and VIAF. Finally, the results of the three layers of analysis are gathered and shown through interactive visualization and storytelling techniques. A demo version of the integrated architecture was developed.

This paper describes the steps of construction of a shallow lexical ontology of Italian Linguistics, set to be used by a meta-search engine for query refinement. The ontology was constructed with the software Protégé 4.0.2 and is in OWL format; its construction has been carried out following the steps described in the well-known Ontology Learning From Text (OLFT) layer cake. The starting point was the automatic term extraction from a corpus of web documents concerning the domain of interest (304,000 words); as regards corpus construction, we describe the main criteria of the web documents selection and its critical points, concerning the definition of user profile and of degrees of specialisation. We describe then the process of term validation and construction of a glossary of terms of Italian Linguistics; afterwards, we outline the identification of synonymic chains and the main criteria of ontology design: top classes of ontology are Concept (containing taxonomy of concepts) and Terms (containing terms of the glossary as instances), while concepts are linked through part-whole and involved-role relation, both borrowed from Wordnet. Finally, we show some examples of the application of the ontology for query refinement.

In this work we propose a hybrid unsupervised approach for semantic relation extraction from Italian and English texts. The system takes as input pairs of ""distributionally similar"" terms, possibly involved in a semantic relation. To validate and label the anonymous relations holding between the terms in input, the candidate pairs of terms are looked for on the Web in the context of reliable lexico-syntactic patterns. This paper focuses on the definition of the patterns, on the measures used to assess the reliability of the suggested specific semantic relation and on the evaluation of the implemented system. So far, the system is able to extract the following types of semantic relations: hyponymy, meronymy, and co-hyponymy. The approach can however be easily extended to manage other relations by defining the appropriate battery of reliable lexico-syntactic patterns. Accuracy of the system was measured with scores of 83.3% for hyponymy, 75% for meronymy and 72.2% for co-hyponymy extraction.

Semantic annotation of text requires the dynamic merging of linguistically structured information and a “world model”, usually represented as a domain-specific ontology. On the other hand, the process of engineering a domain-ontology through semi-automatic ontology learning system requires the availability of a considerable amount of semantically annotated documents. Facing this bootstrapping paradox requires an incremental process of annotation-acquisition-annotation, whereby domain-specific knowledge is acquired from linguistically-annotated texts and then projected back onto texts for extra linguistic information to be annotated and further knowledge layers to be extracted. The presented methodology is a first step in the direction of a full “virtuous” circle where the semantic annotation platform and the evolving ontology interact in symbiosis. As a case study we have chosen the semantic annotation of product catalogues. We propose a hybrid approach, combining pattern matching techniques to exploit the regular structure of product descriptions in catalogues, and Natural Language Processing techniques which are resorted to analyze natural language descriptions. The semantic annotation involves the access to the ontology, semi-automatically bootstrapped with an ontology learning tool from annotated collections of catalogues.

In this paper we present an original approach to natural language query interpretation which has been implemented withinthe FuLL (Fuzzy Logic and Language) Italian project of BC S.r.l. In particular, we discuss here the creation of linguisticand ontological resources, together with the exploitation of existing ones, for natural language-driven database access andretrieval. Both the database and the queries we experiment with are Italian, but the methodology we broach naturally extends to other languages.