Polysemy Index for Nouns: an Experiment on Italian using the PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS Lexical Database

An experiment is presented to induce a set of polysemous basic type alternations (such as ANIMAL-FOOD, or BUILDING-INSTITUTION) by deriving them from the sense alternations found in an existing lexical resource. The paper builds on previous work and applies those results to the Italian lexicon PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS. The new results show how the set of frequent type alternations that can be induced from the lexicon is partly different from the set of polysemy relations selected and explicitly applied by lexicographers when building it. The analysis of mismatches shows that frequent type alternations do not always correspond to prototypical polysemy relations, nevertheless the proposed methodology represents a useful tool offered to lexicographers to systematically check for possible gaps in their resource.