LexicO: an Italian Computational Lexicon derived from Parole-Simple-Clips

Abstract

Parole-Simple-Clips (PSC) is a computational lexicon of the Italian language, developed from 1996 to 2003 by the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the Italian National Research Council (ILC-CNR) in the context of national and European projects. The PSC resource is strongly structured and rich of data, and may provide an edge over existing linguistic resources if used in the support of NLP and text retrieval related tasks, such as, as currently being experimented, for full-text search. However, the lexicon still appears incomplete and contains some redundant, erroneous and missing data. This paper documents the first steps undertaken for the creation of LexicO, an Italian computational lexicon built upon PSC starting from an in depth analysis of its four linguistic layers (semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological) in which it is structured. As a result of this work, LexicO has been released and made freely available for download.