The VIT, Venice Italian Treebank is the effort of the collaboration of people working at the Laboratory of Computational Linguistics of the University of Venice in the years 1995-2005. It is partly the result of annotation carried out internally with no specific project in mind and no financial support. This work was partly related to the development of a lexicon, a morphological analyzer, a tagger, a deep parser of Italian. All these resources were finally ready at the beginning of the ‘90s when the LCL got involved in the first national projects.

The VIT contains about 272,000 words distributed over six different domains, and this is what makes it so relevant for the study of the structure of Italian language. The following domains were annotated:

Domain Number of words Time span
Bureaucratic 20,000 1986
Politics 40,000 1984
Economic & financial 12,000 1987
Literary 10,000 1984
Scientific 20,000 1985
News 170,000 1994

In addition, some 60,000 tokens of spoken dialogues in different Italian varieties were annotated.
The annotation follows general X-bar criteria with 29 constituency labels and 102 PoS tags. VIT is also made available in a broad annotation version with 10 constituency labels and 22 PoS tags for machine learning purposes.
The format is plain text with square bracketing. However, a UPenn style version which is readable by the open source query language CorpusSearch is also provided.