Refined tagging of complex verbal phrases for the Italian language

A verb phrase is a syntactic unit consisting of one verbal form, combined with any other elements, representing the verbal part of the speech. In Italian, as in many other languages, the verb phrase is the central element in a sentence. In this paper, we investigate the problem of the automatic recognition of complex verb phrases in the Italian language, where the wide variety of syntactic units and the complexity of morphology make the problem more difficult to solve than in English. In particular we propose an hybrid approach which faces the recognition and the disambiguation of Italian verb phrases by using language generation. We provide also a web tool1 for testing and querying our method. The level of accuracy and the grade of detail reached by our solution is higher than any other known approach.