Multiword Expressions Resources for Italian: Presenting a Manually Annotated Spoken Corpus

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are word combinations that behave like a unit by showing some type of semantic, syntactic or functional idiosyncratic properties. MWEs are a pervasive phenomenon of language, and the importance of their computational treatment in many Natural Language Processing tasks has long been recognized. However, the ambiguous nature and unpredictable behavior of MWEs make the creation of resources such as lexicons, dictionaries, and annotated corpora difficult and time-consuming. Resources available often focus only on specific kinds of MWE, leaving out the others. This paper presents a corpus of spoken Italian annotated with MWEs by five annotators who are native speakers of Italian and experts in linguistics. The annotation was done in context and comprehensively, without focusing on specific types of MWEs. The corpus contains approximately 50,000 words and 1050 MWE forms, corresponding to 269 MWE types. The corpus is a new and unique resource for spoken Italian and MWEs, which can be used as a gold standard for MWE identification systems and other linguistic tasks. It can also prompt more research on MWEs in spoken varieties of languages.