Search

A lot of research has been done during the first months of 2020 regarding the Covid-19. Researchers of different fields worked and cooperated to understand the virus better, in order to manage the pandemic and to model its spread. A series of tools have been developed in this sense, but there is a lack of work with regards to what has been developed from the scientific community. We would like to, at least partially, summarise the results obtained so far by analysing some of the published papers on the matter. To achieve such a result, we are going to use different python libraries that allow analysing texts. The entire work has been done with python on the Google Colaboratory platform.

La collana pubblica gli atti del convegno annuale di Linguistica Computazionale (CLiC-it), che ha lo scopo di costituire un luogo di discussione di riferimento nel campo delle ricerce sulla linguistica computazionale. Gli atti includono interventi sul trattamento automatico della lingua, comprendenti le riflessioni teoriche e metodologiche sul tema, e forniscono un contributo importante per questo campo di ricerca. Le altre tematiche principali sono: la linguistica computazionale, la linguistica, le scienze cognitive, l'apprendimento automatico, l'informatica, la rappresentazione della conoscenza, l'information retrieval e l'umanistica digitale. L'organizzazione del convegno è il risultato dello sforzo dell'Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale (AILC http://www.ai-lc.it/), rappresentata ogni anno da alcuni dei membri organizzatori, che sono affiliati anche ad altre organizzazioni che operano nell'ambito della linguistica computazionale. This book presents the proceedings of the annual Conference of Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it), which aims to provide a forum for discussion in the field of computational linguistics. The proceedings include interventions on the automatic treatment of language, with theoretical and methodological reflections on the subject, and provide an important contribution to this field of research. The other main topics are: computational linguistics, linguistics, cognitive sciences, automatic learning, computer science, knowledge representation, information retrieval and digital humanities. The organization of the conference is the result of the effort of the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics (AILC http://www.ai-lc.it/), represented every year by some of the organizing members, who are also affiliated to other organizations operating in the field of computational linguistics.

2015 - 2016, In Computational Linguistics there is an essential dichotomy between Linguists and Computer Scientists. The rst ones, with a strong knowledge of language structures, have not engineering skills. The second ones, contrariwise, expert in computer and mathematics skills, do not assign values to basic mechanisms and structures of language. Moreover, this discrepancy, especially in the last decades, has increased due to the growth of computational resources and to the gradual computerization of the world; the use of Machine Learning technologies in Arti cial Intelligence problems solving, which allows for example the machines to learn , starting from manually generated examples, has been more and more often used in Computational Linguistics in order to overcome the obstacle represented by language structures and its formal representation. The dichotomy has resulted in the birth of two main approaches to Computational Linguistics that respectively prefers: rule-based methods, that try to imitate the way in which man uses and understands the language, reproducing syntactic structures on which the understanding process is based on, building lexical resources as electronic dictionaries, taxonomies or ontologies; statistic-based methods that, conversely, treat language as a group of elements, quantifying words in a mathematical way and trying to extract information without identifying syntactic structures or, in some algorithms, trying to confer to the machine the ability to learn these structures. One of the main problems is the lack of communication between these two di erent approaches, due to substantial di erences characterizing them: on the one hand there is a strong focus on how language works and on language characteristics, there is a tendency to analytical and manual work. From other hand, engineering perspective nds in language an obstacle, and recognizes in the algorithms the fastest way to overcome this problem. However, the lack of communication is not only an incompatibility: following Harris, the best way to approach natural language, could result by taking the best of both. At the moment, there is a large number of open-source tools that perform text analysis and Natural Language Processing. A great part of these tools are based on statistical models and consist on separated modules which could be combined in order to create a pipeline for the processing of the text. Many of these resources consist in code packages which have not a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and they result impossible to use for users without programming skills. Furthermore, the vast majority of these open-source tools support only English language and, when Italian language is included, the performances of the tools decrease signi cantly. On the other hand, open source tools for Italian language are very few. In this work we want to ll this gap by present a new hybrid framework for the analysis of Italian texts. It must not be intended as a commercial tool, but the purpose for which it was built is to help linguists and other scholars to perform rapid text analysis and to produce linguistic data. The framework, that performs both statistical and rule-based analysis, is called LG-Starship. The idea is to built a modular software that includes, in the beginning, the basic algorithms to perform di erent kind of analysis. Modules will perform the following tasks: Preprocessing Module: a module with which it is possible to charge a text, normalize it or delete stop-words. As output, the module presents the list of tokens and letters which compose the texts with respective occurrences count and the processed text. Mr. Ling Module: a module with which POS tagging and Lemmatization are performed. The module also returns the table of lemmas with the count of occurrences and the table with the quanti cation of grammatical tags. Statistic Module: with which it is possible to calculate Term Frequency and TF-IDF of tokens or lemmas, extract bi-grams and tri-grams units and export results as tables. Semantic Module: which use The Hyperspace Analogue to Language algorithm to calculate semantic similarity between words. The module returns similarity matrices of words per word which can be exported and analyzed. SyntacticModule: which analyze syntax structures of a selected sentence and tag the verbs and its arguments with semantic labels. The objective of the Framework is to build an all-in-one platform for NLP which allows any kind of users to perform basic and advanced text analysis. With the purpose of make the Framework accessible to users who have not speci c computer science and programming language skills, the modules have been provided with an intuitive GUI. The framework can be considered hybrid in a double sense: as explained in the previous lines, it uses both statistical and rule/based methods, by relying on standard statistical algorithms or techniques, and, at the same time, on Lexicon-Grammar syntactic theory. In addition, it has been written in both Java and Python programming languages. LG-Starship Framework has a simple Graphic User Interface but will be also released as separated modules which may be included in any NLP pipelines independently. There are many resources of this kind, but the large majority works for English. There are very few free resources for Italian language and this work tries to cover this need by proposing a tool which can be used both by linguists or other scientist interested in language and text analysis who have no idea about programming languages, as by computer scientists, who can use free modules in their own code or in combination with di erent NLP algorithms. The Framework takes the start from a text or corpus written directly by the user or charged from an external resource. The LG-Starship Framework work ow is described in the owchart shown in g. 1. The pipeline shows that the Pre-Processing Module is applied on original imported or generated text in order to produce a clean and normalized preprocessed text. This module includes a function for text splitting, a stop-word list and a tokenization method. On the text preprocessed the Statistic Module or the Mr. Ling Module can be applied. The rst one, which includes basic statistics algorithm as Term Frequency, tf-idf and n-grams extraction, produces as output databases of lexical and numerical data which can be used to produce charts or perform more external analysis; the second one, is divided in two main task: a Pos tagger, based on the Averaged Perceptron Tagger [?] and trained on the Paisà Corpus [Lyding et al., 2014], perform the Part-Of- Speech Tagging and produce an annotated text. A lemmatization method, which relies on a set of electronic dictionaries developed at the University of Salerno [Elia, 1995, Elia et al., 2010], take as input the Postagged text and produces a new lemmatized version of original text with information about syntactic and semantic properties. This lemmatized text, which can also be processed with the Statistic Module, serves as input for two deeper level of text analysis carried out by both the Syntactic Module and the Semantic Module. The rst one lays on the Lexicon Grammar Theory [Gross, 1971, 1975] and use a database of Predicate structures in development at the Department of Political, Social and Communication Science. Its objective is to produce a Dependency Graph of the sentences that compose the text. The Semantic Module uses the Hyperspace Analogue to Language distributional semantics algorithm [Lund and Burgess, 1996] trained on the Paisà Corpus to produce a semantic network of the words of the text. These work ow has been included in two di erent experiments in which two User Generated Corpora have been involved. The rst experiment represent a statistical study of the language of Rap Music in Italy through the analysis of a great corpus of Rap Song lyrics downloaded from on line databases of user generated lyrics. The second experiment is a Feature-Based Sentiment Analysis project performed on user product reviews. For this project we integrated a large domain database of linguistic resources for Sentiment Analysis, developed in the past years by the Department of Political, Social and Communication Science of the University of Salerno, which consists of polarized dictionaries of Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs and Nouns. These two experiment underline how the linguistic framework can be applied to di erent level of analysis and to produce both Qualitative data and Quantitative data. For what concern the obtained results, the Framework, which is only at a Beta Version, obtain discrete results both in terms of processing time that in terms of precision. Nevertheless, the work is far from being considered complete. More algorithms will be added to the Statistic Module and the Syntactic Module will be completed. The GUI will be improved and made more attractive and modern and, in addiction, an open-source on-line version of the modules will be published. [edited by author], XV n.s.

In this work we introduce the first steps toward the development of a machine translation system for medical terminology. We explore the possibility of basing a machine translation task in the medical domain on morphology. Starting from neoclassical formative elements, or confixes, we started building MedIta, a cross-language ontology of medical morphemes, aiming to offer a standardized medical consistent resource that includes distributional and semantic information of medical morphemes. Using this information, we have built an ontology-driven Italian-English machine translation prototype, based on a set of Finite State Transducers, and we have carried out an experiment on Orphanet medical corpus to evaluate the feasibility of this approach. In questo lavoro si introduce lo sviluppo di un sistema per la traduzione automatica della terminologia medica. Si propone un approcio morfologico, che utilizza gli elementi formativi neoclassici, i confissi. Si introduce MedIta, un’ontologia multilingua di morfemi del dominio medico, che mira ad offrire una risorsa validata secondo gli standard medici e che contiene informazioni semantiche e statistiche. La fattibilit della risorsa viene valutata tramite un prototipo di sistema di traduzione italiano-inglese basato su Trasduttori a Stati Finiti.L’applicazione viene poi testata su un campione estratto dal corpus medico Orphanet.

CLiC-it 2015 is held in Trento on December 3-4 2015, hosted and locally organized by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), one the most important Italian research centers for what concerns CL. The organization of the conference is the result of a fruitful conjoint effort of different research groups (Università di Torino, Università di Roma Tor Vergata and FBK) showing the nationwide spreading of CL in Italy. As in the first edition, the main aim of the event is at establishing a reference forum on CL, covering all the aspects needed to describe the multi-faceted and cross-disciplinary reality of the involved research topics and of the Italian community working in this area. Indeed the spirit of CLiC-it is inclusive, in order to build a scenario as much as possible comprehensive of the complexity of language phenomena and approaches to address them, bringing together researchers and scholars with different competences and skills and working on different aspects according to different perspectives. The large number of researchers that have decided to present their work at CLiC-it and the number of directions here investigated are proof of the maturity of our community and a promising indication of its vitality. We received a total of 64 paper submissions, out of which 52 have been accepted to appear in the Conference Proceedings, which are available online and on the OpenEdition platform. Overall, we collected 129 authors from 15 countries.