This paper presents the Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multimodal Medical Language Processing (4MLP) Project, funded through a competitive call of the University of Naples ”L’Orientale” (Italy). 4MLP aims at developing multilingual,multicultural, and multimodal language technologies for healthcare to bridge complex medical knowledge and patients’ needs, supporting inclusive and effective healthcare communication while advancing explainable and culturally aware Artificial Intelligence.

Understanding the relation between the meanings of words is an important part of comprehending natural language. Prior work has either focused on analysing lexical semantic relations in word embeddings or probing pretrained language models (PLMs), with some exceptions. Given the rarity of highly multilingual benchmarks, it is unclear to what extent PLMs capture relational knowledge and are able to transfer it across languages. To start addressing this question, we propose MultiLexBATS, a multilingual parallel dataset of lexical semantic relations adapted from BATS in 15 languages including low-resource languages, such as Bambara, Lithuanian, and Albanian. As experiment on cross-lingual transfer of relational knowledge, we test the PLMs’ ability to (1) capture analogies across languages, and (2) predict translation targets. We find considerable differences across relation types and languages with a clear preference for hypernymy and antonymy as well as romance languages.

Extracting events from news stories as the aim of several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications (e.g., question answering, news recommendation, news summarization) is not a trivial task, due to the complexity of natural language and the fact that news reporting is characterized by journalistic style and norms. Those aspects entail scattering an event description over several sentences within one document (or more documents), applying a mechanism of gradual specification of event-related information. This implies a widespread use of co-reference relations among the textual elements, conveying non-linear temporal information. In addition to this, despite the achievement of state-of-the-art results in several tasks, high-quality training datasets for non-English languages are rarely available.

Terminological resources have proven crucial in many applications ranging from Computer-Aided Translation tools to authoring softwares and multilingual and cross-lingual information retrieval systems. Nonetheless, with the exception of a few felicitous examples, such as the IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe) Termbank, many terminological resources are not available in standard formats, such as Term Base eXchange (TBX), thus preventing their sharing and reuse. Yet, these terminologies could be improved associating the correspondent ontology-based information. The research described in the present contribution demonstrates the process and the methodologies adopted in the automatic conversion into TBX of such type of resources, together with their semantic enrichment based on the formalization of ontological information into terminologies. We present a proof-of-concept using the Italian Linguistic Resource for the Archaeological domain (developed according to Thesauri and Guidelines of the Italian Central Institute for the Catalogue and Documentation). Further, we introduce the conversion tool developed to support the process of creating ontology-aware terminologies for improving interoperability and sharing of existing language technologies and data sets.