The Italian Particle “ne”: Corpus Construction and Analysis

AbstractThe Italian particle “ne” exhibits interesting anaphoric properties that have not been yet explored in depth from a corpus and computational linguistic perspective. We provide: (i) an overview of the phenomenon; (ii) a set of annotation schemes for marking up occurrences of “ne”; (iii) the description of a corpus annotated for this phenomenon ; (iv) a first assessment of the resolution task. We show that the schemes we developed are reliable, and that the actual distribution of partitive and non-partitive uses of “ne” is inversely proportional to the amount of attention that the two different uses have received in the linguistic literature. As an assessment of the complexity of the resolution task, we find that a recency-based baseline yields an accuracy of less than 30% on both development and test data.