Measuring Meaning

Abstract

This study will present a tool designed for meaning extraction with monoclausal sentences in Italian. Its main features will be illustrated with instances of the Italian causative clause type featuring the verb fare ‘make’ (e.g. Egli fa piangere il bambino ‘He makes the child cry’), a construction which invariably embeds a clause (e.g.Il bambino piange ‘The child cries’) with which it establishes an entailment relationship. The tool automatically accomplishes the following tasks: it answers relevantwh- questions (e.g. Who cries? Who makes someone cry?) and detects the entailment. Concurrent with this presentation, this study will also encourage a reflection on the research currently being conducted in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, in which data-driven approaches prevail over rule-based systems.