Description

Established in 1980 as an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC) is a national and international centre of reference in the field of Computational Linguistics. It carries out research activities in strategic scientific areas of the discipline, as well as publishing, training, exploitation of results and technology transfer activities.

MAIN AREAS OF RESEARCH
o Digital Humanities
o Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction
o Linguistic Resources, Standards and Research Infrastructures
o (Bio-)Computational Models of language usage

The studies carried out within each area are highly interdisciplinary and involve different professional skills and expertise that extend across the disciplines of Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science and Bio-Engineering.
Research at ILC combines basic research - also including frontier research - and (goal-oriented) applied research, within a virtuous circle with a significant impact on society.

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
The wide variety of lines of activity and research projects at ILC includes: innovative research in the field of Digital Humanities; definition of representation standards and distributed research infrastructures; definition of advanced methods and techniques for the knowledge management of Web content or document collections within Intranets; creation of computational models of language learning in ecological contexts of communicative interaction, etc.
The activities are carried out within a consolidated network of national and international collaborations with universities and public bodies, as well as with industries and small and medium-sized enterprises, in the framework of a large number of research projects.

EDITORIAL ACTIVITIES
o Editorial direction of scientific journals: Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics - IJCoL (Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale - AILC); Language Resources and Evaluation - LRE (Spinger); Lingue e Linguaggio (Il Mulino)
o Editorial activities and responsibilities in scientific committees of specialized journals, e.g. Language Resources and Evaluation and Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics
o Curatorships of volumes dedicated to the state of the art in different areas of Computational Linguistics

TRAINING ACTIVITIES
The Institute provides advanced training opportunities in Computational Linguistics (see the link "Training")

EXPLOITATION OF RESULTS AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
For the exploitation of research results and the technology transfer the Institute has had and currently has many collaborations with public entities and Italian and international enterprises, both SMEs and large industries, including multinational companies (Google, Linkedin, Vodafone, IBM, Microsoft, Meta, Noema Life, Loquendo, Zanichelli, etc.).
Thanks to the collaboration with specialists from other disciplines, the Institute has developed innovative methods and technologies that can be applied in many fields, such as: Public Administration; Education and Training; Health; Cultural Heritage and Tourism; Enterprises; Third sector. The technology transfer, in particular, concerns the expertise acquired in various areas of Computational Linguistics, as well as language resources and technologies that have been integrated into application products for the realization of advanced functionalities for the analysis and processing of documentary bases also of big dimensions and constantly evolving.

The exploitation of research results includes also many promotional and scientific dissemination activities such as:
o Participation in technical-scientific and regulatory bodies; in scientific and evalutation comittees and in networks and associations (CLARIN-Common Language Resources Infrastructure; FlaReNet-Fostering Language Resources Network; NetWordS-The European Network on Word Structure; META-NET-Network of Excellence dedicated to fostering the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society; ELRA-European Language Resources Association; ISO-International Organization for Standardization; ACL-Association for Computational Linguistics, ecc.)
o Organization of summer schools (ESF Interdisciplinary Summer School on the Mental Lexicon) and conferences and workshops in the field of Computational Linguistics at national and international level (LREC-Language Resources and Evaluation Conference; FORUM TAL on Natural Language Processing)
o Realization of various scientific dissemination events with educational and cultural value addressed not only to experts, but also to schools and to the general public (e.g. public events as Internet Festival, Fiera del Libro di Torino, Festival della Scienza, Area Aperta del CNR di Pisa, The European Night of Researchers; dissemination of scientific results through press and radio, etc.).