WordNet for Italian and Its Use for Lexical Deiscrimination

We present a prototype of the Italian version of WordNet, a general computational lexical resource. Some relevant extensions are discussed to make it usable for parsing: in particular we add verbal selectional restrictions to make lexical discrimination effective. Italian WordNet has been coupled with a parser and a number of experiments have been performed to individuate the methodology with the best trade-off between disambiguation rate and precision. Results confirm intuitive hypothesis on the role of selectional restrictions and show evidences for a WordNet-like organization of lexical senses.