L i ITA : a Knowledge Base of Interoperable Resources for I talian (2025)

Abstract: This paper describes the LiITA Knowledge Base of interoperable linguistic resources for Italian.By adhering to the Linked Open Data principles, LiITA ensures and facilitates interoperability between distributed resources. The paper outlines the lemma-centered architecture of the Knowledge Base and details its core component: the Lemma Bank, a collection of Italian lemmas designed to interlink distributed lexical and textual resources.

## introduction in terms of the quantity of digital linguistic resources-both lexical and textual-italian is among the most well-represented languages, and can be considered a highly resourced language. the clarin virtual language observatory, a search engine powered by linguistic resource repositories, foot_0 currently lists over 8,000 resources dedicated to the italian language. among these, there is a substantial set of essential and widely used resources, including italwordnet v.2 @xcite , ten treebanks available from the universal dependencies collection foot_1 , historical corpora, like midia foot_2 and tlio-ovi foot_3 , and reference corpora for both written (e.g., coris/codis @xcite ) and spoken language (e.g., kiparla @xcite ). unfortunately, the many resources for italian display considerable variation in encoding methods, data formats, annotation criteria, and tag sets, often presenting information with different levels of granularity. these inconsistencies hinder seamless interaction between the (meta)data provided by different resources, limiting researchers' ability to fully exploit the empirical potential of linguistic data and diminishing the usability of the resources. as a result, over the past decade, a dynamic scholarly community, centered around the recently concluded cost action nexus linguarum foot_4 , has been actively working to establish standardised practices for representing and publishing linguistic resources following the principles of the linked data paradigm, which underpins the semantic web @xcite . several vocabularies for describing linguistic knowledge have emerged from this initiative and have been widely adopted in designing new resources and adapting existing ones. for italian, some resources are now available as linked open data, including the compl-it lexicon foot_5 , italwordnet v.2 foot_6 , and a collection of names from the parole simple clips (psc) lexicon 8 . an exemplary application of the linked open data (lod) principles to the publication of interoperable linguistic resources is the lila (linking latin) knowledge base (kb), which focusses on resources for the latin language. building on lila as a reference model to achieve online interoperability between distributed linguistic resources-and leveraging its largely language-independent architecture-the liita (linking italian) 9 project is developing a kb of interoperable resources for italian, published as linked data. this short paper presents the development of the core component of the liita kb, the lemma bank, which is a collection of italian lemmas published as lod serving as the linkage point between word occurrences and their corresponding entries in the corpora and lexical resources to be interlinked in the kb. ## conclusions and future work in this paper, we have presented liita, a knowledge base of interoperable linguistic resources for italian built in accordance with the principles of the linked open data paradigm. at the core of liita lies the lemma bank, a centralised collection of italian lemmas carefully curated to address divergent lemmatisation criteria found in existing linguistic resources. we have illustrated how this novel resource handles challenging cases, such as verbal participles and deadjectival adverbs, through explicit modelling choices that reconcile discrepancies and provide uniform access to lexical information. by setting up a shared and interoperable framework, liita enables consistent and semantically transparent cross-resource integration. this approach not only brings clarity and consistency to the integrated resources, but also fosters reusability and long-term maintainability of linguistic assets across different communities and use cases. the principles underlying liita make it a valuable infrastructure for a wide range of applications, from computational linguistics research to practical tasks in lexicography, corpus linguistics, and language technology. its interoperable design, combined with linked data best practices, opens the possibility of creating richer knowledge graphs that go beyond isolated datasets, thus enabling advanced queries and data mining operations at scale. looking ahead, our near-term goals include linking an expanded set of lexical and textual resources for italian, thereby enhancing liita's coverage and robustness. at present, two lexical resources are planned to be linked to liita: (i) a dictionary of the parmigian dialect foot_17 , featuring italian lexical entries and their corresponding translations into the parmaarea dialect; and (ii) compl-it, a linked open data computational lexicon for italian derived from a synthesis of extant linguistic resources. 35 in terms of textual resources, all publicly available italian treebanks in the universal dependencies repository are planned for linkage to liita. notable differences in tokenisation and lemmatisation among these treebanks 36 will represent an optimal test case for assessing the effectiveness of liita's harmonisation strategies. following the approach adopted for lila (passarotti et al., 2024), liita will also develop an online service to facilitate linkage of raw texts in italian through automatic tokenisation and lemmatisation. this service will rely on a newly trained model of the stanza package for language analysis @xcite which leverages all extant italian treebanks as its training data 37 . in addition, li-ita will offer a user-friendly graphical interface to streamline advanced data interrogation across all interconnected resources, simplifying the construction of complex sparql queries. as the lemma bank expands and more resources are integrated, liita will make a substantial contribution to the domain of linguistic linked open data. for example, as stated previously, liita does not currently address multiword expressions (mwes). in corpora, mwes are almost always lemmatised using the lemmas of their individual components and, in some cases, through a kind of super-lemma representing the mwe as a whole. however, mwes are indeed present in certain lexical resources, and at present, these are not being captured in our work. the possibility of including mwes-also supported by the ontolex-lemon model-in the lexical base will require careful consideration, precisely to accommodate the information provided by some of these lexical resources, and expand the potential of the liita lemma bank. through these efforts, we aim to establish liita as a cornerstone of an italian linguistic ecosystem-one that harmonises diverse data sources, stimulates collaborative research, and promotes high-quality linguistic insights for both humans and machines.