Grey Literature and Computational Linguistics: From Paper to Net

The advent and exponential development of the World Wide Web has led to an increasing availability of unstructured knowledge and distributed information sources, meeting general public requirements that are hardly addressed by other more traditional information channels. This trend has concurrently raised a considerable interest in the application of Computational Linguistics (CL) methodologies to document access and retrieval, as they offer the unprecedented opportunity to make the subjective, user-centred information demands of Net citizens meet the ever changing and heterogeneous information flow of the web. Over the last five years, more and more Italian Universities have introduced CL courses into their Humanities curricula, making available on-line teaching materials, tutorials and language engineering software that appear to supply the lack of offer from traditional Italian publishing houses. In this paper, we consider in some detail the role played by this type of Grey Literature in bringing up a wider and increasingly more aware community of web users in Italy.