The Italian Module for NooJ
Authors: Simonetta Vietri (Università di Salerno, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
This paper presents the Italian mod-ule for NooJ. First, we will show the basic linguistic resources: dictionaries, inflectional and derivational grammars, syntactic gram-mars. Secondly, we will show some results of the application of such linguistic resources: the annotation of date/time patterns, the processing of idioms, the extraction and the annotation of transfer predicates.

Introduction
NooJ is a development environment used to construct large-coverage formalized descriptions of natural languages, and apply them to corpora, in real time. NooJ, whose author is Max Silberztein (Silberztein 2003-), is a knowledge-based system that makes use of huge linguistic resources. Dictionaries, combined with morphosyntactic grammars, are the basic linguistic resources without which it would be impossible to perform a text analysis. The system includes various modules for more than twenty languages, among them Italian (.nooj4nlp.net). Most of the Italian linguistic resources are completely new. The goal of the NooJ project is twofold: to provide tools allowing linguists to implement exhaustive descriptions of languages, and to design a system which processes texts in natural language (see Silberztein 2014). NooJ consists of higher and higher linguistics levels: tokenization, morphological analysis, disambiguation, named entity recognition, syntactic parsing1. Unlike other systems, for example TreeTagger, developed by Helmut Schmidt (1995) 2 , NooJ is not a tagger, but the user can freely build disambiguation grammars and apply them to texts. Section 2 describes the Italian dictionary and the inflectional/derivational grammars associated with it. Section 3 shows the extraction of date/time patterns, section 4 the parsing of idioms. Section 5 describes the XML annotation and extraction of transfer predicates.

Conclusion
The application of the Italian module to a corpus of 100MB (La Stampa 1998) produced the following results: 33,866.028 tokens, 26,785.331 word forms. The unknown tokens are loan words, typos, acronyms, alterates8. The Italian module consists of exhaustive dictionaries/ grammars formally coded and manually built on those distributional and morphosyntactic principles as defined within the Lexicon- Grammar framework. Such a lingware (a) constitutes an invaluable linguistic resource because of the linguistic precision and complexity of dictionaries/grammars, (b) can be exploited by the symbolic as well as the hybrid approach to Natural Language Processing. The linguistic approach to NLP still constitutes a valid alternative to the statistical method that requires the (not always reliable) annotation of large corpora. If the annotated data contain errors, those systems based on them will produce inaccurate results. Moreover, corpora are never exhaustive descriptions of any language. On the other hand, formalized dictionaries/ grammars can be enriched, corrected and maintained very easily. Silberztein (2014) contains a detailed discussion on the limits, errors and naïveté of the statistical approach to NLP. The Italian module for NooJ constituted the basis of several research projects such as Elia et al. (2013), Monti et al. (2013), di Buono et al. (2014), Maisto et al. (2014). Therefore, it has been tested, verified and validated. The results constitute the basis for the updating of the module itself. Ultimately, the lexical resources of the Italian module can be easily exported into any format usable by other systems.