Curriculum Vitae - Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale - Cnr

especially for funding agencies, national organisations and industry, and to initiatives for improving
international cooperation and coordination in the field.
It is my position that we have not just to follow the main scientific trends, but to influence – through
our research, our competence and the strength of our visions – new developments in the field and
thus establish new trends and set new research paradigms. This is a winning strategy on the
“research market” that I have always tried to apply. This was/is obviously decisive also in the ability
of getting so many international projects and establishing international cooperation.
Main areas of research:
Computational Linguistics; Language Technology; Language Resources and Knowledge Resources;
Computational Lexicography and Lexicology: Lexical Knowledge Bases, Multilingual lexicons,
Machine-readable dictionaries, relations between Lexicons, Ontologies and Terminologies;
Standardisation and reusability of lexical resources; Corpus Linguistics and statistical analysis of
textual corpora; Knowledge Acquisition from multiple (lexical and textual) sources, integration and
representation; Morphology and word-formation; Lexical Semantics and Semantic Annotation;
Collocations and Multi-words; Natural Language Processing and Language Engineering
Applications: of various types (filtering, summarisation, information extraction, etc.) and in
different areas (e-government, humanities and social sciences, medicine, biology, etc.); Validation
of Language Resources; Infrastructural issues related to Language Resources.
Major achievements:
At the beginning of the „80s I started a new area of research – acquisition of lexical information
from machine-readable dictionaries – that soon became a trendy subject of research, starting the
now consolidated “data-driven” approach. This gave us the coordination of the first ESPRIT Basic
Research Action, ACQUILEX (Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge for Natural Language Processing
Systems) (1989-1995). I was then the coordinator of the first European project on automatic
acquisition of linguistic information from textual data, SPARKLE (Shallow Parsing and Knowledge
extraction for Language Engineering) (1995-97), designing an innovative model of dynamic
computational lexicons.
Together with Antonio Zampolli, we initiated, in the „80s, the quite new sector of “Language
Resources” that has now become an established and very influential sector in our field. This has led
to an impressive number of European and international projects where ILC was/is involved,
bringing a large amount of funding that allowed/allows hiring many young researchers. We
introduced the notion of the “infrastructural” role of language resources that became soon widely
recognised and was at the basis of many strategic activities, from the „90s, both in Europe and
worldwide. This led also to the establishment in 1998 of the biennial international LREC
Conference, of which I am the General Chair since the one in 2004.
I introduced the notion of “reusability” in the area of Language Resources, that finally led to a series
of important initiatives in Europe and world-wide aimed at standardisation in the field, mostly
coordinated by us at ILC.
I was one of the designers of the ESFRI CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technologies
Infrastructure) for Social Sciences and Humanities – of which I am the Chair of the Scientific Board
– now becoming an ERIC (one of the very few in the Humanities).
I am currently the coordinator of the FLaReNet (Fostering Language Resources) Network, with the
explicit mandate of issuing recommendations for future activities in the field – mainly for the
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