Due to the multilinguism of the European Union, there is a growing need for more and more sophisticated software products and services in the fields of translation, foreign-language teaching and document production, covering all official languages of the Union.

The relevant software must access and apply in-depth linguistic knowledge which requires considerable effort to formalize in a computationally tractable manner.

Declarative linguistic specifications expressed in a suitable up-to-date formalism are thus a valuable resource which can be reused in future applications concerned with the language at issue - Italian in the COLSIT (Constraint-based Linguistic Specifications for Italian) project.

Prospective users of the project's linguistic specifications may be identified as academics, students and industrialists, variously interested in natural language processing applications covering the Italian language.

The project aimed at an integrated and consistent manual offering basic linguistic specifications of Italian grammar and lexicon.

The linguistic specifications were formally expressed according to the paradigm of typed feature structure systems with declarative constraints, following especially Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).