Lexical-Semantic Tagging of an Italian Corpus

Semantically tagged corpora are becoming an urgent need for training and evaluation within many applications. They are also the natural accompaniment of semantic lexicons, for which they constitute both a useful testbed to evaluate their adequacy and a repository of corpus examples for the attested senses. It is essential that sound criteria are defined for their construction and a specific methodology is set up for the treatment of various semantic phenomena. We present some observations and results concerning the lexical-semantic tagging of an Italian corpus within the framework of two projects: the ELSNET feasibility study, part of a preparatory phase started with Senseval/Romanseval, and an Italian National Project (TAL), where one of the components is the lexical-semantic annotation of larger quantities of texts for an Italian syntactic-semantic Treebank. The results of the ELSNET experiment have been of utmost importance for the definition of the technical guidelines for the lexical-semantic level of annotation of the Treebank.