Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 199.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 15:10:31 +0100
From: alessandro.lenci@ilc.cnr.it
Subject: Antonio Zampolli 1937-2003
It is with great sorrow that I report that Prof. Antonio Zampolli died in Pisa
on August 22nd, in a terrible accident caused by a fire in his house.
Zampolli was one of the true pioneers of the discipline of Computational
Linguistics. For his activities in this field, he received world wide
acknowledgement and many professional honours. His famous Pisa Summer Schools
influenced the development of this new field in between linguistics and
computer science. In his efforts to create a broad organizational
infrastructure and empirical base for language research and technology he
masterminded the founding of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
and one of the successful international conference series is this area (LREC).
Antonio Zampolli was full Professor of Mathematical Linguistics at the
University of Pisa since 1977, and actually he has been the first professor of
this discipline in Italy. In 1968 he founded the Linguistic Division of CNUCE
in Pisa and became its director. In 1978 this unit was transformed into the
Institute of Computational Linguistics of the National Research Council (CNR).
Zampolli headed this research center for 35 years and turned it into one of the
leading European sites of natural language processing and a center of
excellence for the Italian research in computational linguistics. Recently,
Zampolli was one of the most active promoters of the new degree in "Informatica
Umanistica" (Computer and Humanities) at the Faculty of Letters of the
University of Pisa, where he held the course on Computational Linguistics.
Professor Zampolli was Chair of the ELRA Board and of the International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC); Director of the Pisa
International Summer School for Literary and Linguistic Computing. He was a
permanent member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics,
member of the Steering Committee of TEI and of the ELSNET Management Board. He
was former vice-president of the Association of Computing in the Humanities and
past president of EURALEX.
The wide range of research areas to which he contributed demonstrate the
breadth of his intellectual interests. With more than 250 publications, he
worked in literary and linguistic text analysis, mathematical methods in
humanities, digital language resources, multimodality, standards for literary
and linguistic data processing and computational lexicology/lexicography. He
also played an important role in the design of modalities and strategies for
international co-operation.
With Antonio Zampolli's death the international scientific community also loses
one of its most distinctive and vivid personalities.
Antonio Zampolli will be remembered. We will all miss him a lot.
Alessandro Lenci
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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