PARSEME-It: an Italian corpus annotated with verbal multiword expressions

The paper describes the PARSEME-It corpus, developed within the PARSEME-It project which aims at the development of methods, tools and resources for multiword expressions (MWE) processing for the Italian language. The project is a spin-off of a larger multilingual project for more than 20 languages from several language families, namely the PARSEME COST Action. The first phase of the project was devoted to verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). They are a particularly interesting lexical phenomenon because of frequent discontinuity and long-distance dependency. Besides they are very challenging for deep parsing and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Notably, MWEs are pervasive in natural languages but are particularly difficult to be handled by NLP tools because of their characteristics and idiomaticity. They pose many challenges to their correct identification and processing: they are a linguistic phenomenon on the edge between lexicon and grammar, their meaning is not simply the addition of the meanings of the single constituents of the MWEs and they are ambiguous since in several cases their reading can be literal or idiomatic. Although several studies have been devoted to this topic, to the best of our knowledge, our study is the first attempt to provide a general framework for the identification of VMWEs in running texts and a comprehensive corpus for the Italian language.