In this paper, we illustrate the integration of an online dialectometric tool, Gabmap, together with an online dialect atlas, the Atlante Lessicale Toscano (ALT-Web). By using a newly created url-based interface to Gabmap, ALT-Web is able to take advantage of the sophisticated dialect visualization and exploration options incorporated in Gabmap. For example, distribution maps showing the distribution in the Tuscan dialect area of a specific dialectal form (selected via the ALT-Web website) are easily obtainable. Furthermore, the complete ALT-Web dataset as well as subsets of the data (selected via the ALT-Web website) can be automatically uploaded and explored in Gabmap. By combining these two online applications, macro- and micro-analyses of dialectal data (respectively offered by Gabmap and ALT-Web) are effectively and dynamically combined.

A research has been carried on and is still in progress aimed at the construction of three specialized lexicons organized as databases of relational type. The three databases contain terms belonging to the specialized knowledge fields of maritime terminology (technical-nautical and maritime transport domain), taxation law, and labour law with union labour rules, respectively. The EuroWordNet/ItalWordNet model was firstly used to structure the terminological database of maritime domain. The methodology experimented for its construction was applied to construct the next databases. It consists in i) the management of corpora of specialized languages and ii) the use of generic databases to identify and extract a set of candidate terms to be codified in the terminological databases. The three specialized resources are described highlighting the various kinds of lexical semantic relations linking each term to the others within the single terminological database and to the generic resources WordNet and ItalWordNet. The construction of these specialized lexicons was carried on in the framework of different projects; but they can be seen as a first nucleus of an organized network of generic and specialized lexicons with the purpose of making the meaning of each term clearer from a cognitive point of view.

In this paper Semantic Press, a tool for the automatic press review, is introduced. It is based on Text Mining technologies and is tailored to meet the needs of the eGovernment and eParticipation communities. First, a general description of the application demands emerging from the eParticipation and eGovernment sectors is offered. Then, an introduction to the framework of the automatic analysis and classification of newspaper content is provided, together with a description of the technologies underlying it.

This paper presents a case study concerning the challenges and requirements posed by next generation language resources, realized as an overall model of open, distributed and collaborative language infrastructure. If a sort of “new paradigm” for language resource sharing is required, we think that the emerging and still evolving technology connected to Grid computing is a very interesting and suitable one for a concrete realization of this vision. Given the current limitations of Grid computing, it is very important to test the new environment on basic language analysis tools, in order to get the feeling of what are the potentialities and possible limitations connected to its use in NLP. For this reason, we have done some experiments on a module of the Linguistic Miner, i.e. the extraction of linguistic patterns from restricted domain corpora. The Grid environment has produced the expected results (reduction of the processing time, huge storage capacity, data redundancy) without any additional cost for the final user.