A research has been carried on and is still in progress aimed at the construction of three specialized lexicons organized as databases of relational type. The three databases contain terms belonging to the specialized knowledge fields of maritime terminology (technical-nautical and maritime transport domain), taxation law, and labour law with union labour rules, respectively. The EuroWordNet/ItalWordNet model was firstly used to structure the terminological database of maritime domain. The methodology experimented for its construction was applied to construct the next databases. It consists in i) the management of corpora of specialized languages and ii) the use of generic databases to identify and extract a set of candidate terms to be codified in the terminological databases. The three specialized resources are described highlighting the various kinds of lexical semantic relations linking each term to the others within the single terminological database and to the generic resources WordNet and ItalWordNet. The construction of these specialized lexicons was carried on in the framework of different projects; but they can be seen as a first nucleus of an organized network of generic and specialized lexicons with the purpose of making the meaning of each term clearer from a cognitive point of view.

In the few last years, due to the increasing importance of the web, both computational tools and resources need to be more and more visible and easily accessible to a vast community of scholars, students and researchers. Furthermore, high quality lexical resources are crucially required for a wide range of HLT-NLP applications, among which word sense disambiguation. Vast and consistent electronic lexical resources do exist which can be further enhanced and enriched through their linking and integration. An ILC project dealing with the link of two large lexical semantic resources for the Italian language, namely ItalWordNet and PAROLE-SIMPLE-CLIPS, fits this trend. Concrete entities were already linked and this paper addresses the semi-automatic mapping of events and abstract entities. The lexical models of the two resources, the mapping strategy and the tool that was implemented to this aim are briefly outlined. Special focus is put on the results of the linking process: figures are reported and examples are given which illustrate both the linking and harmonization of the resources but also cases of discrepancies, mainly due to the different underlying semantic models.

In the field of Computational Linguistics, many lexical resources have been developed which aim at encoding complex lexical semantic information according to different linguistic models (WordNet, Frame Semantics, Generative Lexicon, etc.). However, these resources are often not easily accessible nor available in their entirety. Yet, from the point of view of the continuous growth of technology (Semantic Web), their visibility, availability and integration are becoming of utmost importance. ItalWordNet and PAROLE/SIMPLE/CLIPS are two resources which, tackling lexical semantics from different perspectives and being at least partially complementary, can profit from linking each other. In this paper we address the issue of the linking of these resources focusing on the most problematic part of the lexicon: the second order entities. In particular, after a brief description of the two resources, their different approaches to the verb semantics are described; an accurate comparison of a set of verbal entries belonging to Speech Act semantic class is carried out aiming at evaluate the possibilities and the advantages of a semiautomatic link.

The users’ demand has determined the need to manage the growing new technical maritime terminology which includes very different domains such as the juridical or commercial ones. A terminological database was built by exploiting the computational tools of ItalWordNet (IWN) and its lexical-semantic model (EuroWordNet).This paper concerns the development of database structure and data coding, relevance of the concepts of ‘term’ and ‘domain’, information potential of the terms, complexity of this domain and detailed ontology structuring recently undertaken and still in progress. Our domain structure is described defining a core set of terms representing the two main sub-domains specified in ‘technical-nautical’ and ‘maritime transport’ terminology. These terms are sufficiently general to be the root nodes of the core ontology we are developing. They are mostly domain-dependent, but the link with the Top Ontology of IWN remains, endorsing either general and ‘foundation’ information, or detailed description directly connected with the specific domain. Through the semantic relations linking the synsets, every term ‘inherits’ the top ontology definitions and becomes itself an integral part of the structure. While codifying a term in the maritime database, the reference is at the same time allowed to the Base Concepts of the terminological ontology embedding the term in the semantic network, showing that upper and core ontologies make it possible for the framework to integrate different views on the same domain in a meaningful way.