We present a comparison between deep learning and traditional machine learning methods for various NLP tasks in Italian. We carried on experiments using available datasets (e.g., from the Evalita shared tasks) on two sequence tagging tasks (i.e., named entities recognition and nominal entities recognition) and four classification tasks (i.e., lexical relations among words, semantic relations among sentences, sentiment analysis and text classification). We show that deep learning approaches outperform traditional machine learning algorithms in sequence tagging, while for classification tasks that heavily rely on semantics approaches based on feature engineering are still competitive. We think that a similar analysis could be carried out for other languages to provide an assessment of machine learning / deep learning models across different languages.

We present a domain portable zero-shot learning approach for entity recognition in task-oriented conversational agents, which does not assume any annotated sentences at training time. Rather, we derive a neural model of the entity names based only on available gazetteers, and then apply the model to recognize new entities in the context of user utterances. In order to evaluate our working hypothesis we focus on nominal entities that are largely used in e-commerce to name products. Through a set of experiments in two languages (English and Italian) and three different domains (furniture, food, clothing), we show that the neural gazetteer-based approach outperforms several competitive baselines, with minimal requirements of linguistic features.

We describe an experiment for the acquisition of opposition relations among Italian verb senses, based on a crowdsourcing methodology. The goal of the experiment is to discuss whether the types of opposition we distinguish (i.e. complementarity, antonymy, converseness and reversiveness) are actually perceived by the crowd. In particular, we collect data for Italian by using the crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower. We ask annotators to judge the type of opposition existing among pairs of sentences -previously judged as opposite- that differ only for a verb: the verb in the first sentence is opposite of the verb in second sentence. Data corroborate the hypothesis that some opposition relations exclude each other, while others interact, being recognized as compatible by the contributors.

We present a methodology for building lexical sets for argument slots of Italian verbs. We start from an inventory of semantically typed Italian verb frames and through a mapping to WordNet we automatically annotate the sets of fillers for the argument positions in a corpus of sentences. We evaluate both a baseline algorithm and a syntax driven algorithm and show that the latter performs significantly better in terms of precision.