Presenting TWITTIRÒ-UD: An Italian Twitter Treebank in Universal Dependencies

In this paper we describe the early stage application of the Universal Dependencies to an Italian corpus from social media developed for shared tasks related to irony and stance detection. The development of this novel resource (TWITTIRÒ-UD) serves a twofold goal: it enriches the scenario of treebanks for social media and for Italian, and it paves the way for a more reliable extraction of a larger variety of morphological and syntactic features to be used by sentiment analysis tools. On the one hand, social media texts are especially hard to parse and the limited amount of resources for training and testing NLP tools further damages the situation. On the other hand, we thought that adding the Universal Dependencies format to the fine-grained annotation for irony, that was previously applied on TWITTIRÒ, might meaningfully help in the investigation of possible relationships between syntax and semantics of the uses of figurative language, irony in particular.