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Shallow Parsing and Functional Structure in Italian Corpora

In this paper we argue in favour of an integration between statistically and syntactically based parsing by presenting data from a study of a 500,000 word corpus of Italian. Most papers present approaches on tagging which are statistically based. None of the statistically based analyses, however, produce an accuracy level comparable to the one obtained by means of linguistic rules [1]. Of course their data are strictly referred to English, with the exception of [2, 3, 4]. As to Italian, we argue that purely statistically based approaches are inefficient basically due to great sparsity of tag distribution - 50% or less of unambiguous tags when punctuation is subtracted from the total count. In addition, the level of homography is also very high: readings per word are 1.7 compared to 1.07 computed for English by [2] with a similar tagset. The current work includes a syntactic shallow parser and a ATN-like grammatical function assigner that automatically classifies previously manually verified tagged corpora. In a preliminary experiment we made with automatic tagger, we obtained 99,97% accuracy in the training set and 99,03% in the test set using combined approaches: data derived from statistical tagging is well below 95% even when referred to the training set, and the same applies to syntactic tagging. As to the shallow parser and GF-assigner we shall report on a first preliminary experiment on a manually verified subset made of 10,000 words.