Simple_PLUS: a network of lexical semantic relations

The present article deals with the Italian lexical-semantic database Simple_PLUS and focuses on its essential core, i.e. the network of lexical semantic relations. This lexical resource builds on Parole-Simple-Clips, a four-layered electronic lexicon of Italian, founded on the SIMPLE model. Simple_PLUS consists of 30,000 semantic entries, partly imported from the source lexicon and partly newly created, but all encoding a wide-ranging set of information provided by the underpinning model. In Simple_PLUS, this semantic representation has been enriched with significant relational information, in a largely automated, inexpensive process. More than 5,000 relationships between events and their participants and among co-participants in events, links which were not capturable previously through lack of suitable representational means, have been encoded with the appropriate descriptive vocabulary borrowed from the EuroWordNet lexical model. Such conceptual links, which efficiently enhance the predicative representation in the lexicon, provide crucial lexical knowledge for NLP systems and for the Semantic Web.