Il Perugia Corpus: una risorsa di riferimento per l'italiano. Composizione, annotazione e valutazione
Authors: Stefania Spina (Università per Stranieri di Perugia, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The Perugia Corpus (PEC) is a corpus of contemporary Italian written and spoken, which comprises over 26 million words. The objective that led its constitution was to reveal the lack of a corpus of Italian reference. This article describes the criteria on the basis of its com-position, its structure in 10 sections and sub-sections and its multi-level notification, with its respective assessment.

Introduction
The Perugia Corpus (PEC) is a reference corpus of contemporary Italian, written and spoken1; it consists of over 26 million words, distributed in 10 different sections, corresponding to the same text genres, and equipped with a multi-level annotation. The PEC intends to reveal the lack of a reference corpus (written and spoken), which has so far suffered by Italian studies. Because of its nature as a reference resource (EAGLES, 1996), the PEC is designed to provide as general language information as possible about Italian and its main written and spoken varieties. The philosophy that led the composition of the PEC is therefore radically different from that which is at the basis of some web corpora (Baroni and Bernardini, 2006; Kilgarriff and Grefenstette, 2003) of the Italian of last generation such as Pais√† (Lyding et al., 2014), itWac (Baroni and Kilgarriff, 2006) or itTenTen (Jakub' ek et al., 2013), but also from that of the less recent corpora such as Republic (Baroni et al., 2004) and CORIS/CODIS (Rossini Favretti et al., 2002): the choice was in fact that the differentiation of the generials of the text, including the spoken, to the extent of the dimensions of the corpus. In addition, it focused on re-use of existing and available resources (Zampolli, 1991), but sometimes dispersed and difficult to consult; to them were added new data, gathered with the double purpose of filling emptiness in which data was not available for the Italian, and updating existing, but already dated resources. The PEC can therefore be considered a reference corpus √âlow cost√ì, of contained dimensions but with a good representativity of the various written and spoken varieties of Italian. The dimensions contained in the PEC also have two advantages: they allow to manage, in the process of questioning, more managerial results (Hundt and Leech, 2012), and allow to obtain good accuracy in the announcement (see par. 3.2 and 2.

Conclusion
The PEC represents the first reference corpus of contemporary Italian written and spoken; in its composition was privileged the differentiation of text genres, also spoken, compared to the width of dimensions. Realized with limited resources and in short periods of time, using, where possible, existing language resources, the PEC constitutes a low-cost compromise between the creation of new resources and the re-use of existing resources. The PEC interrogation takes place through the CWB interface and the Corpus Query Processor (Evert and Hardie, 2011), which allows you to search for words, sequences of words and notes; it is planned the creation of a network interface via CQPweb (Hardie, 2012), accessible to the public.