Evalita’09 Parsing Task: constituency parsers and the Penn format for Italian

The aim of Evalita Parsing Task is at defining and extending the state of the art for parsing Italian by encouraging the application of existing models and approaches. Therefore, as in the first edition, the Task includes two tracks, i.e. dependency and constituency. This second track is based on a development set in a format, which is an adaptation for Italian of the Penn Treebank format, and has been applied by conversion to an existing dependency Italian treebank. The paper describes the constituency track and the data for development and testing of the participant systems. Moreover it presents and discusses the results, which positively compare with those obtained for constituency parsing in the Evalita’07 Parsing Task.