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An Experiment of Lexical-Semantic Tagging of an Italian Corpus

The availability of semantically tagged corpora is becoming a very important and urgent need for training and evaluation within a large number of applications but also they are the natural application and accompaniment of semantic lexicons of which they constitute both a useful testbed to evaluate their adequacy and a repository of corpus examples for the attested senses. It is therefore essential that sound criteria are defined for their construction and a specific methodology is set up for the treatment of various semantic phenomena relevant to this level of description. In this paper we present some observations and results concerning an experiment of manual lexical-semantic tagging of a small Italian corpus performed within the framework of the ELSNET project. The ELSNET experimental project has to be considered as a feasibility study. It is part of a preparatory and training phase, started with the Romanseval/Senseval experiment (Calzolari et al., 1998), and ending up with the lexical-semantic annotation of larger quantities of semantically annotated texts such as the syntactic-semantic Treebank which is going to be annotated within an Italian National Project (SI-TAL). Indeed, the results of the ELSNET experiment have been of utmost importance for the definition of the technical guidelines for the lexical-semantic level of description of the Treebank.