Senso Comune as a Knowledge Base of Italian language: the Resource and its Development
Authors: Tommaso Caselli, Isabella Chiari, Aldo Gangemi, Elisabetta Jezek, Alessandro Oltramari, Guido Vetere, Laure Vieu, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto (VU Amsterdam, Sapienza Università di Roma, CNR-ISTC, Università di Pavia, Carnegie Mellon University, IBM Italia, CNRS, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
Senso Comune is a linguistic knowledge base for the Italian Language, which accommodates the content of a legacy dictionary in a rich formal model. The model is implemented in a platform which allows a community of contributors to enrich the resource. We provide here an overview of the main project features, including the lexical-ontology model, the process of sense classification, and the an-notation of meaning definitions (glosses) and lexicographic examples. Also, we will illustrate the latest work of alignment with MultiWordNet, to illustrate the method-ologies that have been experimented with, to share some preliminary result, and to highlight some remarkable findings about the semantic coverage of the two re-sources.

Introduction
Senso Comune1 is an open, machine-readable knowledge base of the Italian language. The lex-ical content has been extracted from a monolin-gual Italian dictionary2, and is continuously en-riched through a collaborative online platform. The knowledge base is freely distributed. Senso Comune linguistic knowledge consists in a struc-tured lexicographic model, where senses can be qualified with respect to a small set of ontologi-cal categories. Senso Comune’s senses can be fur-ther enriched in many ways and mapped to other dictionaries, such as the Italian version of Mul-tiWordnet, thus qualifying as a linguistic Linked Open Data resource. 1.1 General principles The Senso Comune initiative embraces a num-ber of basic principles. First of all, in the era of user generated content, lexicography should be able to build on the direct witness of native speak-ers. Thus, the project views at linguistic knowl-edge acquisition in a way that goes beyond the ex-ploitation of textual sources. Another important assumption is about the relationship between lan-guage and ontology (sec. 2.1). The correspon-dence between linguistic meanings, as they are listed in dictionaries, and ontological categories, is not direct (if any), but rather tangential. Lin-guistic senses commit to the existence of various kinds of entities, but should not be in general con-fused with (and collapsed to) logical predicates directly interpretable on these entities. Finally, we believe that, like the language itself, linguistic knowledge should be owned by the entire commu-nity of speakers, thus they are committed to keep the resource open and fully available.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have introduced Senso Comune as an open cooperative knowledge base of Italian language, and discussed the issue of its alignment with other linguistic resources, such as WordNet. Experiments of automatic and manual alignment with the Italian MultiWordNet have shown that the gap between a native Italian dictionary and a WordNet-based linguistic resource may be rele-vant, both in terms of coverage and granularity. While this finding is in line with classic semiology (e.g. De Saussure’s principle of arbitrariness), it suggests that more attention should be paid to the semantic peculiarity of each language, i.e. the specific way each language constructs a concep-tual view of the World. One of the major features of Senso Comune is the way linguistic senses and ontological concepts are put into relation. Instead of equalising senses to concepts, a formal relation of ontological commitment is adopted, which weakens the ontological import of the lexicon. Part of our future research will be dedicated to leverage on this as an enabling feature for the integration of different lexical resources, both across and within national languages.