Due to the rapidly expanding body of biomedical literature, biologists require increasingly sophisticated and efficient systems to help them to search for relevant information. Such systems should account for the multiple written variants used to represent biomedical concepts, and allow the user to search for specific pieces of knowledge (or events) involving these concepts, e.g., protein-protein interactions. Such functionality requires access to detailed information about words used in the biomedical literature. Existing databases and ontologies often have a specific focus and are oriented towards human use. Consequently, biological knowledge is dispersed amongst many resources, which often do not attempt to account for the large and frequently changing set of variants that appear in the literature. Additionally, such resources typically do not provide information about how terms relate to each other in texts to describe events.

Shared task evaluation campaigns represent a well established form of competitive evaluation, an important opportunity to propose and tackle new challenges for a specific research area and a way to foster the development of benchmarks, tools and reso

The paper investigates impact and role of different feature types for the specific task of Automatic Genre Classification with the final aim of identifying the most predictive ones. The goal was pursued by carrying out incremental feature selection through Grafting using different sets of linguistic features. Achieved results for discriminating among four traditional textual genres show the key role played by syntactic features, whose impact turned out to vary across genres.

In this paper we present CItA the first corpus of written essays by Italian L1 learners in the first and second year of lower secondary school. CItA was annotated with grammatical, orthographic and lexical errors. The corpus peculiarities and its diachronic nature make it particularly suitable for computational linguistics applications and socio–pedagogical studies.

The paper introduces Parallel Trees, a novel multilingual treebank collection that includes 20 treebanks for 10 languages. The distinguishing property of this resource is that the sentences of each language are annotated using two syntactic representation paradigms (SRPs), respectively based on the notions of dependency and constituency. By aligning the annotations of existing resources, Parallel Trees represents an example of exploiting pre-existing treebanks to adapt them to novel applications. To illustrate its potential, we present a case study where the resource is employed as a benchmark to investigate whether and how BERT, one of the first prominent neural language models (NLMs), is sensitive to the dependency- and constituency-based approaches for representing the syntactic structure of a sentence. The case study results indicate that the model’s sensitivity fluctuates across languages and experimental settings. The unique nature of the Parallel Trees resource creates the prerequisites for innovative studies comparing dependency and phrase-structure trees, allowing for more focused investigations without the interference of lexical variation.