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Constraining constructions with WordNet: pros and cons for the semantic annotation of fillers in the Italian Constructicon

Flavio Pisciotta, Ludovica Pannitto, Lucia Busso, Beatrice Bernasconi, Francesca Masini

TL;DR

This paper argues for constraining Italian constructional productivity by annotating schematic fillers with WordNet-based semantics within the Italian Constructicon (ItCon). It presents ItCon's architecture, including a CoNLL-C-formatted node-centered graph that can be matched to UD corpora via Grew queries, and explains how Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW) topics, mapped through Italian MultiWordNet, encode OntoClass semantic features for nouns and verbs. Preliminary coverage analyses on Italian treebanks show substantial cross-resource tagging potential, though gaps remain, especially for adjectives/adverbs and cross-POS relations. The authors discuss limitations and outline future work on inter-slot semantic relations and deeper WordNet-based constraints, aiming for broader interoperability across Italian linguistic resources and UD data, with practical impact for annotation-driven construction grammars and cross-linguistic constructicon development.

Abstract

The paper discusses the role of WordNet-based semantic classification in the formalization of constructions, and more specifically in the semantic annotation of schematic fillers, in the Italian Constructicon. We outline how the Italian Constructicon project uses Open Multilingual WordNet topics to represent semantic features and constraints of constructions.

Constraining constructions with WordNet: pros and cons for the semantic annotation of fillers in the Italian Constructicon

TL;DR

This paper argues for constraining Italian constructional productivity by annotating schematic fillers with WordNet-based semantics within the Italian Constructicon (ItCon). It presents ItCon's architecture, including a CoNLL-C-formatted node-centered graph that can be matched to UD corpora via Grew queries, and explains how Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW) topics, mapped through Italian MultiWordNet, encode OntoClass semantic features for nouns and verbs. Preliminary coverage analyses on Italian treebanks show substantial cross-resource tagging potential, though gaps remain, especially for adjectives/adverbs and cross-POS relations. The authors discuss limitations and outline future work on inter-slot semantic relations and deeper WordNet-based constraints, aiming for broader interoperability across Italian linguistic resources and UD data, with practical impact for annotation-driven construction grammars and cross-linguistic constructicon development.

Abstract

The paper discusses the role of WordNet-based semantic classification in the formalization of constructions, and more specifically in the semantic annotation of schematic fillers, in the Italian Constructicon. We outline how the Italian Constructicon project uses Open Multilingual WordNet topics to represent semantic features and constraints of constructions.
Paper Structure (9 sections, 3 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 9 sections, 3 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Architecture of the Italian Constructicon
  3. The CoNLL-C format
  4. WordNet for semantic classification
  5. Coverage of Italian Treebanks lexicon
  6. Limitations
  7. Future steps: annotation of inter-slot semantic relations
  8. Conclusions
  9. Coverage

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Counts and percentages and of noun and verb lemmas by number of OMW topics in Italian Treebanks.
  • Figure 2: Counts and percentages of noun and verb forms by number of OMW topics in Italian Treebanks.
  • Figure : Example of CoNLL-C annotation for the light verb cxn fare Nfeeling 'make feel Nfeeling' (lit. do Nfeeling) pisciotta-masini. Since this construction only occurs with a psychological noun in the singular form, the features of the noun are specified with "number=sing", and the semantic layer uses the topic of "feeling" to constraint the nouns that can occurr in the second slot of the construction.