The Cnr-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” was established in 1980 as an independent institute of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italian National Research Council).
CNR-ILC is the first Italian center devoted to Computational Linguistics as an autonomous discipline, and one of the first centres internationally.
CNR-ILC: the time line
Directors
- Antonio Zampolli (1980-2003)
- Nicoletta Calzolari (2003-2008)
- Andrea Bozzi (2008-2013)
- Vito Pirrelli (June-November 2013)
- Simonetta Montemagni (2013-2024; Interim Director since March 2024)
Since its establishment,through a large network of collaborations with public and private, European and non-European, research centres, CNR-ILC has been developing synergies with the major stakeholders in the field, with a view to identifying needs and priorities, defining work programs and monitoring progress in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Processing.
At the international level CNR-ILC has always promoted the inclusion of Italian into the multilingual network of global society, and has been influencing the strategic visions implemented by international organisations in different areas of Computational Linguistics through:
- participation in the activities of the major international scientific associations in the field(as ELRA, ALLC, EURALEX, ACL, ACH);
- organisation of international events such as the “International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation” (LREC);
- promotion and/or participation in international networks (from the early networks of the late 1990s, as ELSNET (European Network in Language and Speech) and ENABLER ENABLER (European National Activities for Basic Language Resources), to the most recent CLARIN, FLaReNet, META-NET and NetWordS.
At the national level, the Institute is among the founding members of the Forum TAL network (2002) and the TAL Intesa Agreement (2012), which established an institutional framework for collaboration and activation of synergies with some of Italian leading research centres in the field of NLP.
CNR-ILC contributed to:
- the creation and development of initiatives for the evaluation of tools for Natural Language Processing of the Italian language (EVALITA since 2007)
- the foundation and activities of the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics – AILC (since 2015).