LICO: A Lexicon of Italian Connectives
Authors: Anna Feltracco, Elisabetta Jezek, Bernardo Magnini, Manfred Stede (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Università di Pavia, University of Potsdam, 2016)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
This paper presents the first release of LICO, a Lexicon for Italian COnnectives. LICO includes about 170 discourse connectives used in Italian, together with their orthographical variants, part of speech(es), semantic relation(s) (according to the Penn Discourse Treebank relation catalogue), and a number of usage examples.

Introduction
Discourse connectives are explicit lexical markers that are used to express functional relations between parts of the discourse. As an example, the italian word ``quando'' in the sentence ``Quando si preme sul bottone, la porta si apre da sola'' (When you press the button, the door opens by itself) expresses a conditional relation between two parts of the sentence (from now on, arguments). Work on discourse connectives in Computational Linguistics was initially part of Rhetorical Structure Theory AUTHOR, where the focus is on discourse relations, which are at the basis of the notion of textual coherence. In Computational Linguistics, being able to identify connectives is a central task in ``shallow discourse parsing'', which has become very popular in recent years (e.g., AUTHOR) and constituted the shared task of the CONLL conference in 2015 and 2016. Downstream applications that can benefit from shallow discourse structure are, inter alia, sentiment analysis (e.g., AUTHOR and argumentation mining (e.g., AUTHOR). Our work on connectives is mainly motivated by the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, still there is no high coverage resource of discourse connectives available for Italian. LICO, the Lexicon for Italian COnnectives, aims at filling this gap, providing a repository of Italian connectives aligned with recent developments in discourse relations (i.e. the last version (3.0) of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)). In addition, the LICO lexicon takes advantage from DimLex, a similar repository for German AUTHOR; in fact DimLex served as the main inspiration for creating LICO (see section building). DimLex is an XML-encoded resource that can be used for NLP; the public version provides information on orthographical variants, syntactic behavior, semantic relations (in terms of PDTB), and usage examples. It is used for automatic discourse parsing, and also for semi-automatic text annotation using the ConAno tool AUTHOR.} Another relevant resource for connectives is LEXCONN, for French, AUTHOR, which contains about 300 connectives with their syntactic category and coherence relations from Segmented Discourse Representation Theory AUTHOR(and to some extent Rhetorical Structure Theory AUTHOR). LICO is freely distributed under a CC-BY licence.

Conclusion
In this paper we have presented LICO, a new resource for the Italian language describing lexical properties of discourse connectives. While LICO fills a gap with respect to similar resources existing for other languages, it is still under construction under several aspects. Our short term plans include the completion of the lexical entries with corpus derived examples and the observation of the connectives in Italian corpora, in order to acquire more information about the semantic relations that each connective can indicate and thus extend the annotation of the semantic relations in LICO. \\ We acknowledge Denise Pangrazzi for her contribution to identify the Italian equivalents of the German connectives.