The goal of this paper is to introduce T-PAS, a resource of typed predicate argument structures for Italian, acquired from corpora by manual clustering of distributional information about Italian verbs, to be used for linguistic analysis and semantic processing tasks. T-PAS is the first resource for Italian in which semantic selection properties and sense-in-context distinctions of verbs are characterized fully on empirical ground. In the paper, we first describe the process of pattern acquisition and corpus annotation (section 2) and its ongoing evaluation (section 3). We then demonstrate the benefits of pattern tagging for NLP purposes (section 4), and discuss current effort to improve the annotation of the corpus (section 5). We conclude by reporting on ongoing experiments using semiautomatic techniques for extending coverage (section 6).

In this paper, we discuss our analysis and resulting new annotations of Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) data tagged as Concession. Concession arises whenever one of the two arguments creates an expectation, and the other ones denies it. In Natural Languages, typical discourse connectives conveying Concession are 'but', 'although', 'nevertheless', etc. Extending previous theoretical accounts, our corpus analysis reveals that concessive interpretations are due to different sources of expectation, each giving rise to critical inferences about the relationship of the involved eventualities. We identify four different sources of expectation: Causality, Implication, Correlation, and Implicature. The reliability of these categories is supported by a high inter-annotator agreement score, computed over a sample of one thousand tokens of explicit connectives annotated as Concession in PDTB. Following earlier work of (Hobbs, 1998) and (Davidson, 1967) notion of reification, we extend the logical account of Concession originally proposed in (Robaldo et al., 2008) to provide refined formal descriptions for the first three mentioned sources of expectations in Concessive relations.