Developing language resources and applications with Geppetto

In the development of LE applications there are two crucial areas: architectural design and resource development. In this paper we describe the design phase, current status, and future directions of a development environment, called GEPPETTO, whose aim is to address the two issues within the same environment. The design of GEPPETTO has been carried out using a user-centered approach, to secure the satisfaction of user needs and desiderata. The final aim of the environment is very complex and expensive; to obtain short-term intermediate results we adopted an incremental approach, developing firstly the tasks we considered more urgent and critical in LE applications and postponing the development of some other tasks. Currently only the environment for linguistic resource development has been fully implemented, whereas the other parts of the system are in progress. A case study of application of the currently implemented version of GEPPETTO to a system for Information Extraction from text is also presented; such case study confirmed the usefulness of the tools already developed and provided interesting suggestions concerning what is needed during the development of LE applications.