The native TUT format

TUT adopts a representation format based on the dependency paradigm centred upon the notion of predicate-argument structure, as described with reference to major Italian linguistic phenomena in the Linguistic notes. The choice of this paradigm that describes syntactic structures using dependency relations between pairs of words, depends on the partial configurationality of the reference language, i.e. Italian is a free word order language.
In TUT the dependency relations are annotated by following the Augmented Relational Structure (ARS) where each relation is implemented as a feature structure that can include values for a morpho-syntactic, a functional-syntactic and a syntactic-semantic component.

The need for a description of grammatical relations more detailed and more proximate to semantics has determined the development of a rich and flexible grammatical relation system for TUT, i.e. around 250 relations annotated at variable degree of specification according to a hierarchical organization. When the annotator cannot select a specific relation to label the dependency edge linking two words, he/she can select a more generic relation from the higher levels of this taxonmy.
To represent some phenomenon involving discontinuity and deletions as well as pro-drop subject, TUT has been enriched with a trace-filler notation (see 1. Traces and co-indexing in Linguistic notes for examples and further details).
See at the following example:

Each line contains all the information concerning a single node-word X:
the position of X within the linear order of the sentence,
the morphological features of X (in round brackets),
the position of the head-word Y from which X depends, and the name of the relation linking X to Y (both in square brackets).
According to the ARS, the name of each relation may include three components separated by hyphens:
MORPHOSYNTACTIC - FUNCTIONALSYNTACTIC - SEMANTIC (the symbol + is used as a separator between 2 parts of a single component).

The converted formats

Parallel treebanks may serve as a suitable infrastructure for the comparison of parsers from different linguistic frameworks, thus contributing in the investigation of the causes of the irreproducibility of state-of-the-art results on annotations other than Penn Wall Street Journal and languages other than English.
A conversion tool has been applied to the native TUT in order to generate a Penn-like annotation. As a side effect, has been developed two other formats that show intermediate layers of variation/similarity with respect to the TUT and Penn in terms of both richness of functional-syntactic information (i.e. amount and specificity of grammatical relations) and type of linguistic framework (i.e. constituency versus dependency, or minimal versus maximal projection). The following image shows the cascade of formats (a rich selection of examples in parallel formats is available in Parallel annotations in TUT formats):

TUT corpus and subcorpora

The current Italian corpus (see below for download and description of current and previous releases) is composed by:

The first contest among parsing systems for Italian Evalita 2007 - Parsing Task (see publications) exploited TUT as development data set, both in native dependency and Penn format. In particular, the more recently added Italian materials, i.e. 100 sentences for the civil law corpus and 100 for newspaper, are the test set of this contest.

Moreover a small English corpus of 200 sentences has been added just as a support for non-Italian speakers to the comprehension of the annotation scheme. It is composed by:

For peculiar features (and extensions) of the TUT scheme for representing English structures see the section Applying TUT on English of the "Linguistic Notes".