The Cnr-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (CNR-ILC) is one of the major leading research centers in the field of Computational Linguistics (LC).

The Institute is part of the Cnr-Dipartimento Scienze Umane e Sociali, Patrimonio Culturale.

CNR-ILC has been carrying out advanced research, training and technology transfer activities, together with a wide range of editorial activities.

Mission

Our mission of is to contribute to the scientific and technological development of strategic areas of Computational Linguistics through:

• a balanced combination of fundamental and applied research, focusing on their impact on society and its socio-economic and cultural development;
• collaboration with research institutes, universities, public bodies, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and industries within international, European, national and regional scientific collaboration projects and agreements;
• training of students conducted through teaching activities at Italian and foreign universities and the involvement of PhD students, undergraduates and interns in ongoing research activities;
• technology transfer of developed language resources and technologies to SMEs and large national and multinational industries.

Macro-areas of research

The current macro-areas of research of CNR-ILC are:

• Digital Humanities
• Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Management
• Language Resources, Standards, and Research Infrastructure
• (Bio-)Computational Models of language usage

Since its foundation, CNR-ILC has focused its interests and activities on those research areas that lie at the historical “roots” of Computational Linguistics:

• Humanistic Text Processing (HTP), using computational methods and techniques to support humanistic research on texts, with a focus on Philology
• Natural Language Processing (NLP), aimed at the analysis of the linguistic structures underlying a text.

Since the late 1980s, the synergies between the two lines of activity gave rise to a line of research dedicated to the design and construction of language resources and infrastructures and the definition of representation standards shared by the scientific community.

More recently, a new line of research focused on the development of bio-computational models of language and cognition joined forces with these “historical” lines of activity.