Formalizing a Construction for ItCon: A Practical Guide

Each construction in ItCon is defined by a main file, in .yaml format, and a machine-readable formalization in CoNLL-C format — a UD-compatible convention for expressing the constraints a construction must satisfy. This guide walks through both, plus how to annotate construction instances in a corpus (CoNLL-Uc) and the overall annotation workflow.

This is based on the project’s authoritative guide, publications/tutorial/guida.md (Italian) in the repository, integrated with additional detail from the project wiki where the wiki goes deeper than the guide itself — those pages are marked as such and linked from the relevant section below.

1. The .yaml construction file
2. YAML fields reference — extra detail, from the wiki
3. The CoNLL-C format
4. CoNLL-C field reference — extra detail, from the wiki
5. Semantic features — extra detail, from the wiki
6. Semantic roles — extra detail, from the wiki
7. Morphology
8. Formal variation in CoNLL-C
9. Annotating examples in CoNLL-Uc
10. Workflow: how to formalize a construction

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Table of contents

• The .yaml construction file
• YAML fields reference
• The CoNLL-C format
• CoNLL-C field reference
• Semantic features
• Semantic roles
• Morphology
• Formal variation in CoNLL-C
• Annotating examples in CoNLL-Uc
• Workflow: how to formalize a construction