DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14282668
title: ItaIst_GRU

description: ItaIst-GRU (Institutional Italian – Urban Waste Management) is a curated collection of linguistic resources designed to support the study and enhancement of institutional communication in the field of urban waste management. The resources are specifically intended to document and analyse the linguistic variety of institutional Italian (Vellutino, 2018).

The collection was developed within the theoretical framework of research on institutional Italian and according to the methodology for institutional terminology analysis proposed by Vellutino (2014, 2015, 2018; Vellutino et al., 2012). This framework identifies the information obligations established by the Italian Law 150/2000, the corresponding communicative contexts, and, consequently, the different types of institutional texts.

At present, the ItaIst-GRU collection comprises three main resources:





ItaIst-DdAC_GRU – A monitoring corpus of institutional texts relating to urban waste management.




ItaIst-TermRifiuti – A gold-standard corpus with terminological annotation, consisting of a sample of texts drawn from ItaIst-DdAC_GRU.




ItaIst-WasteLexicon – A terminological database compiling and organising institutional terms pertaining to urban waste management.





ItaIst-DdAC_GRU 

The ItaIst-DdAC_GRU corpus (Institutional Italian for the Right of Civic Access – Urban Waste Management) (Vellutino & Cirillo, 2024) is a structured collection of institutional texts dealing with urban waste management. It was created to analyse the specialised terminology employed by public administrations both in professional communication between experts and in information addressed to citizens.

The corpus includes administrative acts and informative materials such as press releases, public notices, and web content. It was designed to provide an empirical foundation for the study of terminological variation in institutional language and to support the development of linguistic and terminological tools for the urban waste management sector.

All texts in ItaIst-DdAC_GRU are richly annotated with metadata describing their textual type, in accordance with the classification model for institutional texts used in Public Communication and Institutional Information (“CPI”) activities (Vellutino, 2018; Vellutino et al., 2012). This classification enables an analysis of the degree of specialisation of the expressions employed, in relation to the intended audiences of public communication.



ItaIst-TermRifiuti

ItaIst-TermRifiuti is an annotated corpus derived from a stratified, non-proportional sample of texts selected from ItaIst-DdAC_GRU, balanced across textual types. The corpus contains terminological annotations produced by four annotators, who identified and classified specialised terms according to shared annotation guidelines. Each term is associated with labels indicating its domain of reference.

Beyond enabling the study of phenomena such as terminological variation, polysemy, and ambiguity in institutional language, ItaIst-TermRifiuti constitutes one of the first gold-standard datasets for training and evaluating automatic term extraction techniques for Italian.



ItaIst-WasteLexicon

ItaIst-WasteLexicon is a terminological database that compiles and organises specialised terms relevant to urban waste management. It contains approximately 900 terms, carefully extracted and selected from ItaIst-TermRifiuti, and arranged within a conceptual hierarchy reflecting the relationships between concepts and sub-concepts in the waste management domain.

For each term, the database provides linguistic, conceptual, and communicative information, including morphological structure, syntactic structure, lexical relations, and concept definitions. The primary aim of ItaIst-WasteLexicon is to serve as a reference tool for professionals engaged in public communication, supporting informed terminology choices according to the intended audience. It also represents a valuable resource for linguistic research, education, and the development of language technologies for processing institutional Italian.



References

Vellutino, D. (2014). Esercizi di stile per il diritto di accesso civico. In La lingua variabile nei testi letterari, artistici e funzionali contemporanei. Analisi, interpretazione, traduzione. Atti del XIII Congresso della Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana. Palermo: Centro Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani, 1–16.

Vellutino, D. (2015). Risorse linguistiche e Open Data per la comunicazione pubblica della gestione dei rifiuti urbani. In D. Vellutino & M. T. Zanola (a cura di), Comunicare in Europa. Lessici istituzionali e terminologie specialistiche (pp. 217–245). Milano: EDUCatt – Ente per il Diritto allo Studio Universitario dell’Università Cattolica. ISBN: 9788883119163.

Vellutino, D. (2018). L’italiano istituzionale per la comunicazione pubblica. Bologna: il Mulino.

Vellutino, D., & Cirillo, N. (2024). Corpus «itaist»: Note per lo sviluppo di una risorsa linguistica per lo studio dell’italiano istituzionale per il diritto di accesso civico. Italiano LinguaDue, 16(1), 238–250.

Vellutino, D., Marano, F., & Elia, A. (2012). L’italiano istituzionale e le sue varietà d’uso pubblico: Aspetti lessicali nei tipi di testo d’informazione e comunicazione delle pubbliche amministrazioni. In Atti XI Congresso SILFI.