Ontology-based formalization of Italian Clitic Verbal MWEs: an Approach for Supporting Machine Translation

In this paper we present the development of an ontology-based bilingual (IT-EN) lexicographic resource of Italian clitic Verbal MultiWord Expressions (VMWEs) to support machine translation. Starting from an analysis of these units and their linguistic features, we examine how Neural Machine Translation (NMT) handles complex VMWEs and the related translations issues. Finally, we propose a bilingual resource, formalised by means of the OntoLex-Lemon model, which accounts for morphological, syntactic, and semantic features of Italian clitic verbs, in order to enhance automatic translation of VMWEs.