The study analyses a novel corpus of 76 freely available English authentic suicide notes (SNs) (letters and social media posts), spanning from 1902 to 2023. By using computational and corpus linguistics, this research aims at decoding patterns of discourse, content, and emotions in SNs. In particular, we explore variation in linguistic features in SNs across sociolinguistic factors (age, gender, addressee, time period) and between genres (letter vs. post). To this end, we use topic models, subjectivity analysis, and sentiment and emotion analysis. Results highlight how both style, content, and emotion expression, show differences depending on genre, gender, age group and time period. We suggest a more nuanced approach to personalized prevention and intervention strategies based on insights from computer-assisted linguistic analysis.

We describe and make available the game-based material developed for a laboratory run at several Italian science festivals to popularize NLP among young students.

Although Natural Language Processing is at the core of many tools young people use in their everyday life, high school curricula (in Italy) do not include any computational linguistics education. This lack of exposure makes the use of such tools less responsible than it could be, and makes choosing computational linguistics as a university degree unlikely. To raise awareness, curiosity, and longer-term interest in young people, we have developed an interactive workshop designed to illustrate the basic principles of NLP and computational linguistics to high school Italian students aged between 13 and 18 years. The workshop takes the form of a game in which participants play the role of machines needing to solve some of the most common problems a computer faces in understanding language: from voice recognition to Markov chains to syntactic parsing. Participants are guided through the workshop with the help of instructors, who present the activities and explain core concepts from computational linguistics. The workshop was presented at numerous outlets in Italy between 2019 and 2020, both face-to-face and online.

This paper proposes a new method for Italian verb classification -and a preliminary example of resulting classes- inspired by Levin (1993) and VerbNet (Kipper-Schuler, 2005), yet partially independent from these resources; we achieved such a result by integrating Levin and VerbNet’s models of classification with other theoretic frameworks and resources. The classification is rooted in the constructionist framework (Goldberg, 1995; 2006) and is distribution-based. It is also semantically characterized by a link to FrameNet’ssemanticframesto represent the event expressed by a class. However, the new Italian classes maintain the hierarchic “tree” structure and monotonic nature of VerbNet’s classes, and, where possible, the original names (e.g.: Verbs of Killing, Verbs of Putting, etc.). We therefore propose here a taxonomy compatible with VerbNet but at the same time adapted to Italian syntax and semantics. It also addresses a number of problems intrinsic to the original classifications, such as the role of argument alternations, here regarded simply as epiphenomena, consistently with the constructionist approach.