Visualising Italian Language Resources: a Snapshot
Authors: Riccardo Del Gratta, Francesca Frontini, Monica Monachini, Gabriella Pardelli, Irene Russo, Roberto Bartolini, Sara Goggi, Fahad Khan, Valeria Quochi, Claudia Soria, Nicoletta Calzolari (CNR-ILC, 2015)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
This paper aims to provide a first snapshot of Italian Language Resources (LRs) and their uses by the community, as documented by the papers presented at two different conferences, LREC2014 and CLiC-it 2014. The data of the former were drawn from the LOD version of the LRE Map, while those of the latter come from manually analyzing the proceedings. The results are presented in the form of visual graphs and confirm the initial hypothesis that Italian LRs require concrete actions to enhance their visibility.

Introduction
The availability of Language Resources (LRs) - such as corpora, computational lexicons, parsers, etc. - is crucial to most NLP technologies (Machine Translation, Crosslingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual Information Extraction, Automatic Document Indexing, Question Answering, Natural Language Interfaces, etc.). Recent initiatives have monitored the availability of language resources for different languages, and highlighted a digital divide between English and other languages AUTHOR. While the economic potential of English ensures that English LRs are developed and maintained not only in the academic sector but also by commercial players, the involvement of research communities for languages such as Italian is much more crucial to ensure that the necessary instruments (both data and tools) are made available for natural language processing purposes. At the same time, the production of quality LRs is just a first step; LRs must also be documented and made available to the community in such a way that they are easy to find and to use. This entails the description of every LR with a set of metadata that clarify its typology, its language, its size and licensing scheme, and the means of accessing it. Useful information in this sense can be found in the catalogues of language resources associations, such as ELRA, LDC, NICT Universal Catalogue, ACL Data and Code Repository, OLAC, LT World. These catalogues adopt a top-down approach to documenting resources and typically list resources that have reached a high level of maturity - in term of validation, documentation, clearing of IPR issues, etc. As an alternative to this approach, recent projects have been carried out within the LR community to create open, bottom-up repositories where LRs - even those under development - can be duly documented and searched. Such initiatives are for instance the META-SHARE platform AUTHOR, the CLARIN VLO AUTHOR and the LRE Map AUTHOR, with their sets of metadata. In particular the LRE Map was launched as an initiative at LREC2010 in order to crowdsource reliable and accurate documentation for the largest possible set of resources. Authors submitting to that conference were asked to document the resources they used in their paper, both the resources they created and the ones created by others. This initiative has continued and been extended to other conferences, and is now a unique source of information on existing language resources and their use in current research. The work in this paper can be set against the background of the major projects in which CNR ILC is currently involved and the aim of setting up a documentation center for language and textual resources within the framework of the CLARIN and DARIAH research infrastructures. As a CLARIN and DARIAH node, CNR ILC has the task of collecting and harmonizing metadata description of LRs at a national level, making Italian resources more visible to national and international research groups, both to the NLP and to the digital humanities communities. To this purpose, our team has inspected the panorama of LR descriptions available in the aforementioned catalogues, and in particular the LRE Map which allows us to monitor how communities build around LR use. Our hypothesis is that many of the resources that the Italian community uses and produces are not as well documented as they should be. As a consequence, many researchers may not be aware of the existence of resources that could be of use for them, and limit themselves to those they know best. In order to verify this, we carried out a cross-analysis of Italian LRs and their uses by Italian researchers, exploiting the data found in the LRE Map from the LREC2014 dataset, which is currently available in LOD format AUTHOR. Such data is compared with similar evidence gathered from the proceedings of the CLiC-it 2014 conference, which are available online. CLiC-it 2014 did not adhere to the LRE Map initiative, but comparable information has been collected by manually inspecting the papers. In what follows we will provide a brief description of the set of metadata that we used to monitor the situation with respect to Italian LRs and their use; then some results will be analyzed and discussed by means of graph-like visualizations; finally some conclusions are drawn and perspectives for future work outlined.

Conclusion
In this work we use visualisations to show how the Italian NLP community uses LRs in the works presented at two recent conferences of the sector (LREC2014 and CLiC-it 2014). We highlight how collaborations cluster around the use of major resources, and how networks are created by users of the same resource. From the comparison of the two datasets we can infer that the Italian panorama of language resources is rich and varied. We also confirm the prior hypothesis that Italian LRs are rather under-documented and that some positive action is needed in the direction of enhancing their visibility. As a consequence the creation of an observatory of Italian language resources, which is meant to be the nucleus of a newly established CLARIN-IT center, is more than justified. Such an observatory will actively promote the Italian LR community (both creators and users), help in improving the documentation of LRs thus making them more widely known to others and finally ensure their visibility in an international context by using all current standard metadata framework and platforms. This latter point shall involve also an active contribution to the de-fragmentation of the current situation in metadata and description practices, as well as the porting of LR descriptions to emerging channels and formats (LINGhub, RDFLOD).