This paper presents work on document retrieval for Italian carried out at ITC-irst. Two different approaches to information retrieval were investigated, one based on the Okapi weighting formula and one based on a statistical model. Development experiments were carried out using the Italian sample of the TREC-8 CLIR track. Performance evaluation was done on the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (C...

The present paper examines the elicited production of definite determiners, pronominal and reflexive clitics in a group of Italian children diagnosed for Selective Language Impairment. The present results argue against the Surface Hypothesis (Leonard, 1998; Leonard, 1989): Italian singular definite determiners and object pronominal clitics are phonologically identical, they are brief and non sa...

A generic audio-based multimedia indexing and retrieval framework is presented. This work is mainly finalized to the development of various digital archives and technologies focused on the creation of a Content Management System (CMS) for Italian Literature specialized on searching, reading and listening. The main general objectives, among others more specific, are: the promotion of reading and...

This paper undertakes an empirical investigation into the treatment of tripartite Italian idioms in selected monolingual Italian and bilingual Italian-English dictionaries. Tripartite idioms are phrasal constructs typically arranged into one of the three following syntactic forms: V+N+N, V+ADJ+N or V+N+ADJ. From an organisational viewpoint, these idioms are somewhat more problematic for lexicog...

Background In recent years, accreditation of private hospitals followed by decentralisation of the Italian National Health Service (NHS) into 21 regional health systems has provided a good empirical ground for investigating the Tiebout principle of “voting with their feet”. We examine the infra-regional trade-off between greater patient choice (due to an increase in hospital services supply) an...

Introduction Hadron-therapy is an effective technique used to treat tumors that are located between or nearby vital organs. The Italian National Center of Oncological Hadron-therapy (CNAO) has been realized as the first facility in Italy to treat very difficult tumors with protons and Carbon ions. The on-line monitor system for CNAO has been developed by the Department of Physics of the Univers...

Our goal is to create a natural Italian talking face with, in particular, lip-readable movements. Based on real data extracted from an Italian speaker with the ELITE system, we have approximated the data using radial basis functions. In this paper we present our 3D facial model based on MPEG-4 standard and our computational model of lip movements for Italian. Our experiment is based on some pho...

Surnames of grandparents were collected from children in the primary schools of the Albanian-Italian, Croat-Italian and Greek-Italian villages of southern Italy and Sicily. The coefficients of relationships by isonymy show almost no relationship with ethnicity. Ethnolinguistic minorities of southern Italy and Sicily are geographically subdivided into two main clusters: the first cluster compris...