Evaluation of Natural Language Tools for Italian: EVALITA 2007

EVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative d evoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Proces sing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants’ systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tas ks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), P arsing (organised by the University of Torino), Wor d Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and s hared evaluation practices is a crucial step toward s the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such g oals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages.