  The project presented in this article aims to formalize criteria and
procedures in order to extract semantic information from parsed dictionary
glosses. The actual purpose of the project is the generation of a semantic
network (nearly an ontology) issued from a monolingual Italian dictionary,
through unsupervised procedures. Since the project involves rule-based Parsing,
Semantic Tagging and Word Sense Disambiguation techniques, its outcomes may
find an interest also beyond this immediate intent. The cooperation of both
syntactic and semantic features in meaning construction are investigated, and
procedures which allows a translation of syntactic dependencies in semantic
relations are discussed. The procedures that rise from this project can be
applied also to other text types than dictionary glosses, as they convert the
output of a parsing process into a semantic representation. In addition some
mechanism are sketched that may lead to a kind of procedural semantics, through
which multiple paraphrases of an given expression can be generated. Which means
that these techniques may find an application also in 'query expansion'
strategies, interesting Information Retrieval, Search Engines and Question
Answering Systems.
