ItalWordNet: building a large semantic database for the automatic treatment of Italian

Abstract - This paper describes the main characteristics of the ItalWordNet semantic database, built in the context of the SI-TAL Italian National Project, within which a set of integrated resources and tools for the automatic treatment of the Italian language was realized. The database was created by extending the Italian wordnet developed within the EuroWordNet project, by adding: i) adjectives, adverbs and proper nouns (not dealt with in EuroWordNet); ii) a terminological subset related to the economic-financial domain. The relevant changes involved by these extensions both in the linguistic model and in the data structure are also illustrated. In particular, we discuss: i) the overall architecture of the database; ii) the semantic relations used to encode information on synsets; iii) the changes made to the EuroWordNet Top Ontology structure; iv) the specific characteristics of the terminological subset and the solutions adopted to link it to the generic wordnet. Keywords - synset, semantic database, wordnet, semantic