Trattamento automatico della lingua a supporto dell’editoria: primi esperimenti con il Devoto-Oli Junior
Authors: Irene Dini, Felice Dell'Orletta, Fabio Ferri, Biancamaria Gismondi, Simonetta Montemagni (CNR-ILC, Mondadori Education, 2021)
Topic: Learner Corpora and Language Acquisition

Abstract
The paper illustrates the results of a first experiment in which Natural Language Processing was used to support the revision of a children's dictionary, in particular for what concerns style and words of definitions and the enrichment of the list of lemmas. The results achieved are promising and demonstrate the potential of a synergy to be strengthened in the publishing sector. The article illustrates the results of an experiment within which TAL technologies have been used to support the drawing up of a children's dictionary, in particular with regard to the formulation of definitions and the updating of the keywords. The results achieved are promising and show the potential for synergy to be strengthened in the publishing sector.

Introduction
Awareness of the potential of artificial intelligence (IA) methods and techniques in the publishing sector is spreading rapidly. The White Paper on The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Publishing Industry (2019) reports the results of an international survey from which it emerges that 25% of the publishing companies interviewed have already invested in applications of IA techniques within different sectors, ranging from marketing and distribution to publishing. Within the scenario just outlined, a central role is played by methods and techniques for the Automatic Treatment of Language (TAL), which are now mature in order to contribute significantly to the different phases of the publishing process, allowing - for example - to index on a semantic basis the information content of a text, to monitor its complexity and communicative effectiveness in relation to the type of recipients, to guide its possible reformulation, to verify the possible presence of plagiarism, or to provide support to the phases of linguistic and typographical control. In this contribution, we report the results of a first and promising experiment jointly conducted by the Mondadori Education Publishing House and the CNR Computational Linguistics Institute, within which TAL technologies were used to support the design of the new edition of a children's dictionary: the Devoto-Oli Junior (DJ). In particular, the themes of the control, evaluation and specialisation of the dictionary in relation to the audience of the recipients were addressed, trying to reconcile two apparently contrasting perspectives, the accessibility of the contents on the one hand and their informativeness on the other. The product Dictionary A publishing house has with its dictionary a complex relationship: work of remarkable editorial and economic commitment; publication of prestige and, as it uses to say, of brand positioning; produced with diffusion and decreasing profits. Experimenting in ways, times, targets and mistakes is a luxury that belongs to the past; hence the need for a more reliable, faster approach, without waste: therefore, scientific-technological. And, as will be best described below, the TAL benefits from a lexicographic editing in the construction of the keywords, also in relation to the target market. Whatever the lexicographic setting is positive, historical-linguistic or with a valent taste, the choice of the keyword is, first of all, a marketing matter: there is no dictionary on the market today that will not flaunt the number of voices or lemmas, meanings, neologisms. It is easy to understand that, at the time of purchase, an exterminated lemary is a guarantee of the ability of the dictionary itself to solve our problems (at least those lexical and orthographic, it means). Yet the seduction of a universe by alphabetical order confronts two inevitable industrial problems: the number of pages and the cost. A book, understood as a physical object, has its own ergonomics and there are physical limits beyond which binding operations become senseless and unwelcome consultation. Then there is a direct mathematical relationship, as the commercial directors reminiscent of incessantly between the number of pages and cost: in the world of Google and Wiktionary, the price is a very delicate deal, if not for institutional buyers, certainly for families. A particular challenge is then a dictionary with a reference school target: if in fact a vocabulary of use has totalizing ambitions, a vocabulary for the school is an ontologically editorial operation as it is based on the ability to choose and cut out a plausible and useful linguistic world. Operation not so trivial when considering the ambivalence of the language to which the students are exposed: on the one hand, basic vocabulary that they employ with greater or lesser proficiency; on the other hand, technical and technical-scientific disciplinary vocabulary of which school texts are understandably rich (alniscient, antagonist, exarchate, tectonic, phospholipidic etc.). And, as is easy to imagine, this ambivalence will invest both the choice of voices and the construction of the single definition. The new edition of a dictionary The design of the new edition of the DJ focused on two main issues: the language used in the definitions, its complexity and effective accessibility for the user to whom the work is intended, i.e. children aged 8 to 13 years; the keyword, its verification and its update almost ten years after the first edition, given to the prints in 2012.

Conclusion
In a dictionary of the language of use the speaker must be able to reflect himself, because he is at the same time the source and the recipient of the work. If this is true for any dictionary, it is even more so for those aimed at the market of the Primary School, in which everything must be child-friendly: the size of the volume and the price, because the Primary is the school of obligation par excellence, the level of complexity of the language, which must be proportionate to the knowledge and needs of children and their teachers. Since the requirements are so particular, the use of efficient production techniques in a work such as the DJ is therefore essential. TAL technologies have responded perfectly to this demand for efficiency. The verification of the existing keyword through the removal of large corporations targeted on the target, the classification of the lexical and syntactic complexity of the definitions identified through the use of an instrument such as READ-IT, the identification of the new entries to be inserted thanks to the cross-use of all these techniques have produced in short time certain and reliable results. Above all they have allowed the lexicographer to work on circumscribed and hierarchicalized objectives, reconciling the perspective of accessibility with that of the informativeness of the work. The work alongside editors and researchers has also opened up new areas of experimentation and reflection, such as the search for new definitory models, more accessible than traditional ones. Bruno Migliorini, now many decades ago, closed his clear prose on the vocabulary with a distrusted statement: "On the future of Italian lexicography it is not possible to make omens." Today, thanks to experiments like this, we are able to say something more: the TAL cannot but be part of this future.