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LIT: transcription, annotation, search and visualization tools for the Lexicon of the Italian Television

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Abstract

LIT (Lexicon of the Italian Television) is a project conceived by the Accademia della Crusca, the leading research institution on the Italian language, in collaboration with CLIEO (Center for theoretical and historical Linguistics: Italian, European and Oriental languages), with the aim of studying frequencies of the Italian vocabulary used in television. Approximately 170 hours of random television recordings acquired from the national broadcaster RAI (Italian Radio Television) during the year 2006 have been used to create the corpus of transcriptions. The principal outcome of the project is the design and implementation of an interactive system which combines a web-based video transcription and annotation tool, a full featured search engine, and a web application for data visualization with text-video syncing. Furthermore, the project is currently under deployment as a module of the larger national research funding FIRB 2009 VIVIT (Fondo di Investimento per la Ricerca di Base, Vivi l'Italiano), which will integrate its achievements and results within a semantic web infrastructure.

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Acknowledgments

The LIT project was initially funded by CLIEO, the “Center for theoretical and historical Linguistics: Italian, European and Oriental languages”, in collaboration with the Accademia della Crusca, the leading research institution on the Italian language, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Nicoletta Maraschio, who allowed to kick off this research. Most of the computer engineering work done at the Media Integration and Communication Center had a continuous feedback from researchers of the Accademia and would not have been possible with the precious support of Marco Biffi and Vera Gheno. Luckily enough, the initial financial support of CLIEO has been extended for a 3 years project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, which will allow integrating semantic web functionalities.

Besmir Bregasi, Ervin Hoxha and Tiberio Uricchio are three M.Eng. students who merely knew how things could get complicated when projects are delivered by the Media Integration and Communication Center, but they had the chance to learn a lot while working on their B.Eng. dissertation assignment. Freshness of young minds is always a plus when efforts can be focused and welded with senior experience.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Media Integration and Communication Center, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Thomas M. Alisi, Alberto Del Bimbo, Andrea Ferracani, Tiberio Uricchio, Ervin Hoxha & Besmir Bregasi

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  1. Thomas M. Alisi
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  2. Alberto Del Bimbo
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Correspondence to Thomas M. Alisi.

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Alisi, T.M., Del Bimbo, A., Ferracani, A. et al. LIT: transcription, annotation, search and visualization tools for the Lexicon of the Italian Television. Multimed Tools Appl 60, 327–346 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0610-3

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