Rodolfo DELMONTE

Graduated in 1973 at the University of Venice in Foreign Languages and Literatures he won a European-Australian Award and spent one year in Australia working on a Ph.D. dissertation in which the use of the computer was directed at the quantitative analysis of literary texts.
He got his Ph.D. in 1977 and published part of his thesis in a book with the title Piercing into the Psyche: the Poetry of Francis Webb. At the same time in 1976 he started working at the University of Venice as Assistant Professor, teaching English in scientific curricula.
From 1978 to 1986 he collaborated with the Department of Electronics of the University of Padua and with major Italian research centers for the implementation of a programme which encodes linguistic information of any Italian text in order to be used for the generation of speech synthesis from text with unlimited vocabulary.
In 1983 he organized a number of Meetings on Computational Linguistics from which a collection of papers is edited into a book. In the same year he presented his work at the conference of the European Chapter of ACL in Pisa.
In 1984 he was invited to present a paper Conference on Computers in English Language Research, by Geoffrey Leech of ICAME.
In 1985 he was appointed Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics. In the same year, he was invited to deliver a talk on his research work in the field of natural language processing by Douglas Appelt at Stanford University which appeared as paper published by the European Chapter of ACL.
From 1986 to 1992 he collaborated with the Department of Engineering of the University of Parma for the implementation of a parser for Italian which has subsequently become a complete system for text understanding called GETA_RUN, and has been presented and demonstrated at major ACL conferences.
From 1993 he is officially in charge of a course of Computational Linguistics which is currently attended by students of computer science and students of linguistics.
From 1994 to 1996 he is named by the Administration Board of Ca’Foscari University, director of an internal project for the creation of a system of self-instruction called SLIM – Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software – which integrates speech recognition tools and a fully linguistically comprehensive annotated database of the dialogues which is used by the system to assess and organize drills automatically. The system is also equipped by a prototype Prosodic Tutor for word and sentence level prosodic practice.
In 1995 he is called to teach in the Summer School of Computational Linguistics organized in Bulgaria by Prof.Ruslan Mitkov.
In 1996 he starts to be member of the Scientific Committee of the annual international Conference RANLP (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing).
In 1995-96 he takes part in a number of meetings at European level as representative of Ca’ Foscari University related to European projects MLAP – ILAM – LOTUS for the deployment of multimedia and speech technologies in language teaching, as User Interest Group.
He works as consultant for DIDAEL in the European project SPEAK for the introduction of speech technologies.
In 1999 he is called to teach in the Summer School of Computational Linguistics EUROLAN organized in Romania by Prof.Dan Cristea.
In 1999 he is President of the Workshop InSTIL organized within the conference EUROCALL’99 at Besançon.
In 1999-2001 he is scientific coordinator of the Research Unit at CVR (Center Venice Research) for the Italian Syntactic Semantic Treebank within the National Project SI-TAL coordinated at a national level by prof.Zampolli.
In 1999-2001 he is scientific coordinator of the Research Unit of Ca’Foscari University in the National Project API/AVIP for the parsing of regional spoken Italian.
In 1999 he is founding member of the Steering Committee of ISCA.
In 2000 he is President of the Scientific Committee of Workshop InSTIL organized in Dundee at EUROCALL2000, where he presents a seminar on the use of Speech Synthesis in self-learning language systems.
In 2001 he is invited as Keynote Speaker at EUROCALL2001 in Nijmegen, where he presents the talk: “Good and bad practices in CALL: will e-learning help the student with the appropriate feedback?”
He delivers a talk at the Workshop, "Computational and Pedagogical Challenges for NLP in CALL", SIG in Language Processing, 29/8/01, Nijmegen, PARSER AND FEEDBACK FOR NLP STUDENTS.
Other conferences :
« Linguistic Information Extraction for Text Summarization », at CIS at the University of Muenchen, 29/06/01.
STRUCTURE REPRESENTATION IN GETARUN, Workshop "Discourse Representation and Analysis ", EPFL, 22/5/01, Lausanne.
MULTIMEDIA FEEBACK GENERATION AND LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES", at Queen's University, Faculty of Education, Kingston(Ontario).
2002
He is member of the Scientific Committee of the conference PORTAL, on NLP, Faro – Portugal; member of the Scientific Committee of the conference TALN2002 on NLP, Nancy, France; member of the Scientific Committee of the conference ROMAND2002 on NLP, Rome, Italy ; Program Chair of NLP Workshop for the AI*IA – Italian Association of Artificial Intelligence, Siena, Italy.
Local organizer of the International Conference TAG+6 Tree Adjoining Grammar, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in Venice – Auditorium S.Margherita, Ca’ Foscari University (May 2002); Local organizer of the International Conference LBC – Language Brain and Computation, in collaboration with the University UQUAM, Montreal(Canada), in the same place (October 2002).
2003
He is invited as exchange Professor at the University of Paris VII – D.Diderot – Jussieu, (May 2003).
International referee for the flemish "Scientific Research Fund" (FWO) in Belgium, for a research project with the title: Refined speech modeling techniques for computer aided learning.
Invited to participate at the CSLR  International Workshop on Tools and Technologies for Individuals with Cognitive Disabilities, which took place at the University of Colorado at Boulder , from 30 June – to 25 July 2003. Sponsored by: The National Science Foundation, and The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities, where he delivers the talk "GETARUN - A Complete System for Text Understanding".
Conferences
"Parsing An Italian Corpus of Spontaneous Speech", Swiss Federal Institute of Technology , EPFL, LITH, Lausanne, Switzerland, May 2003.
"Text Summarization and Question Answering: Against Bag-of-Words Approaches used in Information Retrieval Systems", University of Zurich, May 2003.
2003
Member of the Commissione Giudicatrice per Concorso a Ricercatore, Università di Bergamo, March 2001.
Member of the Commissione Giudicatrice per Concorso a Professore Associato, Università di Milano La Bicocca, June 2003.
2004
Member  Program Committee of the ACL-2004 Workshop on Reference Resolution and Its Applications.
Member  EsTAL 2004 Conference Program Committee
Membro della Commissione Giudicatrice per Concorso a Professore Associato, Università di Salerno.
Member  Program Committee of the ACL-2004 Workshop on Reference Resolution and Its Applications.
Member  EsTAL 2004 Conference Program Committee
 International referee per il "Scientific Research Fund" (FWO) in Belgio, per un progetto di ricerca dal titolo: Refined speech modeling techniques for computer aided learning.
2005
International Referee for SSHRC, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the External Assessment of an application for a Grant no. 410-06-1292 with the title "Mapping Migmaq Language & Mind: Dynamic Analysis and Visualization of Data from the Multimodal Migmaq Comparative Corpus".
Member of the Commissione Giudicatrice per Concorso a Professore Associato, Università di Padova, March 2005.
Referee for LREC-2006 Genova; referee for FINTAL; referee for EMNLP.
2007
Member of the Scientific Committee of the project SENSO COMUNE started at the IBM Foundation, Roma.
Member of the Scientific Committee of the Workshop on Text Meaning and Interpretation, held in USA together with the Internation Conference of Artificial Intelligence.
Member of the Scientific Committee of the Program Committee of the conference RANLP ’07 held in Bulgaria.
Member of the Scientific Committee of the Workshop SLATE held in October in Pennsylvania.
2008
Referee for NLPCS 2008; Referee for LREC 2008; Referee for GOTAL 2008; Referee for STEP 2008
Referee for SPEECH COMMUNICATION (SPECOM)
2009
Referee for SPEECH COMMUNICATION (SPECOM); Referee for NLPCS 2009; Referee for EACL 2009; Referee for GEMS Workshop 2009
16/18 october 2005
Seminars for the research doctorate in “Teorie e pratiche della interpretazione e della traduzione linguistica, letteraria e culturale” (XX ciclo), Theme: Aspects and problems of machine translation
4 november 2005
Seminar at Master in Literary Translation, Università Ca’ Foscari. Theme: Machine Translation: state of the art.
2006
From September 15, he is Invited Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas – Human Language Technologies Research Institute, to work at the National Project AQUINAS – Answering Questions Using Advanced Semantics), where he will stay until January 30, 2007.
2007
NATO-ASI – Batumi Georgia
In the month of september he teaches in the school organized around the theme of minority languages, that is less resourced languages, by developing the  theme of treebanks, state of the art and tools for their production.
2008
From October 15 and for one month, he is Invited Professor at the Université de France-Comté, a Besançon, at the Centre Tesnière de Linguistique Computationelle, where he he delivers a course in Experimental Phonetics  and General Phonology.
2009
Referee for SPEECH COMMUNICATION (SPECOM); Referee for NLPCS 2009; Referee for EACL 2009;
Referee for GEMS Workshop 2009; Referee for ISMTCL – Besançon; SLATE – Birmingham; JNLE Special Issue Springer; EACL 2009 – Athens; TESOL QUARTERLY; LANGUAGE TESTING;
Expert ANR-CSOSG’09 (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) – Project Outils Multi-Couches de Séparation de Parole.
2010
Referee for: ICETAL Rejkyavich; LREC – Malta; SLATE – Waseda; DART – Geneva; IWCS - Oxford, DART – PostProcessing.
President Commission AERES CRTT Lyon, May 2010. International Expert for the European Commission in the Information Society and Media Directorate-General - Language Technologies, Machine Translation Program. Brussels, June 2010.
2011
Member of Scientific Committee for NLPCS2011
Member of Scientific Committee for SLATE2011
President of Ph.D. Commission - University of Trento - International Doctorate School in Information and Communication Technologies, DISI - University of Trento. For the tesi Component-Based Textual Entailment: a Modular and Linguistically-Motivated Framework for Semantic Inferences Elena Cabrio - APRIL 2011
2012
Member of Scientific Committee for LREC2012
Member of Scientific Committee for NAACL-HLT 2012
Member of Scientific Committee for *SEM - NAACL
Member of Scientific Committee for NLPCS - Wrocław, Poland
Referee for ITRJ-12-047
 2013
Member of Scientific Committee for ACL2013 – SEMANTIC AREA, ATLANTA
Member of Scientific Committee for SLATE 2013, GRENOBLE
Member of Scientific Committee for *SEM - 2013
Member of Scientific Committee for ISA-9 - 2013
Member of Scientific Committee for IWCS 2013
Member of Scientific Committee for IJCNLP 2013, NAGOYA
Member of Scientific Committee for NLPCS - MARSEILLE, FRANCE


Invited Conferences
In 2000 he is President of the Scientific Committee of Workshop InSTIL, where he presents a seminar on the use of Speech Synthesis in self-learning language systems.
In 2001 he is invited as Keynote Speaker at EUROCALL2001 in Nijmegen, where he presents the talk: “Good and bad practices in CALL: will e-learning help the student with the appropriate feedback?”
He delivers a talk at the Workshop, "Computational and Pedagogical Challenges for NLP in CALL", SIG in Language Processing, 29/8/01, Nijmegen, PARSER AND FEEDBACK FOR NLP STUDENTS.
Other conferences :
« Linguistic Information Extraction for Text Summarization », at CIS at the University of Muenchen, 29/06/01.
STRUCTURE REPRESENTATION IN GETARUN, Workshop "Discourse Representation and Analysis ", EPFL, 22/5/01, Lausanne.
MULTIMEDIA FEEBACK GENERATION AND LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES", at Queen's University, Faculty of Education, Kingston(Ontario).
2002
"Tecnologie computazionali avanzate per la generazione di feedback per l'autoapprendimento linguistico", presso il CLI – Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, 12 novembre 2002.
"Tecnologie linguistiche per l'auto-apprendimento", CNR Padova (csrf.pd.cnr.it), 14 novembre 2002.
2003
International referee for the Flemish "Scientific Research Fund" (FWO) in Belgium, for a research project with the title: Refined speech modeling techniques for computer aided learning.
Invited to participate at the CSLR  International Workshop on Tools and Technologies for Individuals with Cognitive Disabilities, which took place at the University of Colorado at Boulder , from 30 juin – to 25 July 2003. Sponsored by: The National Science Foundation, and The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities, where he delivers the talk "GETARUN - A Complete System for Text Understanding".
Conferences
"Parsing An Italian Corpus of Spontaneous Speech", Swiss Federal Institute of Technology , EPFL, LITH, Lausanne, Switzerland, May 2003.
"Text Summarization and Question Answering: Against Bag-of-Words Approaches used in Information Retrieval Systems", University of Zurich, May 2003.
He delivers a talk with the title "Metodi AI e tecnologie linguistiche per motori di ricerca", Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione – Università di Siena, 3 febbraio 2003.
He delivers a talk with the title "Strumemti Automatici per l'Annotazione di Dialoghi Italiani", LABLITA, Laboratorio Linguistico, Dipartimento di Italianistica, Università di Firenze, 27 marzo 2003.
He delivers a talk with the title “Annotazione GToBI e l'apprendimento dell'intonazione del tedesco come seconda lingua", LABLITA, Laboratorio Linguistico, Dipartimento di Italianistica, Università di Firenze, 28 marzo 2003.
2005
He delivers a talk with the title “Treebanks di italiano scritto e parlato: strutture sintattiche e semantiche dell'italiano contemporaneo”, Giornate di studio sui materiali didattici per l’insegnamento delle lingue straniere, Università degli Studi di Firenze, 3 - 4 marzo 2005, www.dssg.unifi.it/_linguedeuropa
He delivers a talk with the title “Dal Question-Answering alle applicazioni per l'Apprendimento delle Lingue attraverso la creazione di Risorse Linguistiche”, CILTA – Bologna, 22 aprile 2005. http://www.cilta.unibo.it
7/8 novembre 2005
He delivers two talks at the l'ICTP (International Centre for Theoretical Physics) di Trieste within the workshop "Web Enabling Technologies and Strategies for Scientific e-Learning":
- Language Learning with Speech, NLP (Natural Language Processing) Technologies and Talking Faces
- CSLR Communicator and Interactive Books
2006
He delivers a talk with the title “VIT - Venice Italian Treebank”, 16 febbraio 2006, Facoltà Informatica - Università di Bolzano,
He delivers a talk with the title “Inducing Frames in the Italian lexicon”, 6-9 giugno 2006 FRAMES - Università di Bologna.
He delivers a talk with the title “Modernism and Hermetism: Early 20th century Italian Poetry”, 12 luglio 2006 – University of Melbourne, Australia House.
He delivers a talk with the title “A Prosodic Module for Language Tutoring”, 17 luglio 2006 – University of Brisbane, Department of Linguistics.
2008
He delivers a talk with the title “GReG Reranks Google”, 4 maggio 2008 – at the UFRJ - Computer Science/Engineering - Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
He delivers a talk with the title “Speech Technologies as Teaching Aids”, 5 novembre 2008 - Centre Tesnière – Besançon.
He delivers a talk with the title “Computing Implicit Entities and Events for Text Understanding”, 4 dicembre 2008 - IRST-FBK.
He delivers a talk with the title “A Prosodic Module for Language Tutoring”, 9 dicembre 2008 - Centre Tesnière – Besançon.
He delivers a talk with the title “An Automatic Translator for Veneto-English and Viceversa”, 11 dicembre 2008 – Departement de Linguistique – Genève.
2010
12/11/2010 Melbourne:
Rodolfo Delmonte, "IR/IE, QA and implicit entities".
Language Technology Seminars, ICT (Information Technology and Communication), Faculty of Computer Science, Melbourne University, invited by Dr. Thimothy Baldwin at,
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/research/lt/

16/11/2010  Melbourne:
Rodolfo Delmonte, Overlaps in dialogues.
University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts, School of Languages & Linguistics, invited by prof. John Hajek, at http://www.languages.unimelb.edu.au/research/seminars/

22/11/2010  Sydney:
Rodolfo Delmonte,Coreference Resolution and Bridging Definite Descriptions,
Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Faculty of Science, Centre for Language Technology, invitato dal collega prof. Diego Mollà, at http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/

9/12/2010 Keynote Speaker
Rodolfo Delmonte:
OPINION MINING, SUBJECTIVITY and FACTUALITY by Rodolfo Delmonte (University Ca'Foscari, Italy), at conference ALTA (Australasian Language Technology Association) WorkShop,
held at ICT of University of Melbourne, invited by organizer Nitin Indurkhya and by scientific comittee, at http://www.alta.asn.au/events/alta2010/index.html

16/12/2010 Melbourne:
Statistical Approaches vs. Rule-Based Approaches in Recommender Systems, Monash University, Clayton, Faculty of Information Technology, CSSE, invited by prof. Ingrid Zuckerman and her work group.

2011
Invited Talk at Xerox Europe - Grenoble, on Coreference Resolution by the title "Implicit linguistic entities and the problem of coreference resolution", http://videos.xrce.xerox.com/index.php/videos/index/557


4. Organization of Conferences
Local organizer of the National Conference– IX° Giornate del GFS - Gruppo di Fonetica Sperimentale, AIA - Associazione Italiana di Acustica – Venezia 17-19 December 1998 – Aula Magna Ca’ Dolfin.
Local organizer of the International Conference – VEXTAL ’99 – Venezia per il Trattamento Automatico delle Lingue – 22-24 November 1999 – V.I.U. Isola di San Servolo.
Local organizer of the International Conference TAG+6 Tree Adjoining Grammar, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in Venice – Auditorium S.Margherita, Ca’ Foscari University (May 2002);
Local organizer of the International Conference LBC – Language Brain and Computation, in collaboration with the University UQUAM, Montreal(Canada), in the same place (October 2002).
Local organizer of the International Conference – ARQAS – Anaphora Resolution for Question/Answering and Summarization – 23-24 June 2003 – Auditorium Santa Margherita.
Local organizer of the International Conference - InSTIL05 - NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems - Auditorium Santa Margherita - 17-19 June 2004
Local organizer of the International Conference 2nd PASCAL CHALLENCES WORKSHOPS – 10-12 April 2006, Auditorium Santa Margherita.
Local organizer of the International Conference STEP2008 – Semantics in Text Processing, 22-24 September 2008, Aula Magna Ca’ Dolfin.
Local organizer of the International Conference SLATE2011 – 24-26 August 2011, Aula Magna Ca’ Dolfin.
Local organizer of the International Conference AISV 2013, 25-27 January, Venice, Ca’ Bernardo.

Master Thesis  Supervised
Academic Year 1979-80
• Gabriella Franco: Il Problema della Localizzazione dell'Accento Lessicale in Italiano - Università di Torino - Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia

Academic Year 1984-85
• Maria Teresa Bombi: Un Analizzatore Sintattico per la Lingua Italiana - Università di Padova - Facoltà di Ingegneria
• Giorgio Satta: Un Analizzatore Morfologico per la Lingua Italiana - Università di Padova - Facoltà di Ingegneria

Academic Year 1985-86
• Roberto Dolci: Algunas construcciones con anteposición de constituyentes oracionales en español: su determinación y análisis sintáctico
• Laura Brugé: Estudio sobre la sintaxis de las oraciones relativas especificativas en español
• Giovanna Lacedelli:  Concordances et index de la poésie Mallarméenne

Academic Year 1987-1988
• Marialuisa Furlan: Parsing tense and aspect in conceptual representations
• Marina Salvato: Analyse Morphologique et Syntaxique de "Petits Poemes en Prose" de Mallarmé

Academic Year 1988-89
• Cristina Vallini: Analyse der pronominalen und anaphorischen Beziehung und die Rueckgewinnung der Antezedenzien im Gespraech

Academic Year 1989-90
• Emanuele Pianta: Rilevanza e Rappresentazione: Preliminari teorici a un sistema per la generazione automatica del linguaggio naturale
• Alessandra Compagnin: Quelques cas d'Ambivalence Semantique dans les "Maximes" de La Rochefoucauld
• Annalisa Sanson: Die Derivation der Linguistiches Inferenzen im Satz durch die Eigenschaften der Praedikat-Argument-Strukturen

Academic Year 1990-91
• Rossano Rossi: An LFG-Based Approach to Machine Translation

Academic Year 1991-92
• Giovanni Alberti: Computing Grammatical Cues for Utterance and Text Understanding
• Monica Dan: Computing Modification with Open and Closed Adjuncts
• Sartori Sandra: Anaphoric Binding and Discourse Factors
• Pozzan Rita: The Collected Poems by Ivor Gurney: A Concordance
• Marzia Viale: The Collected Poems by Edward Thomas: A Concordance

Academic Year 1992-93
• Francesca Sampaoli: A Linguistic Comparative Analysis of Two Translations of a Short Story by William Faulkner

Academic Year 1994-95
• Denise Dibattista: Switching from Narrative to Legal Genre in Discourse

Academic Year 1997-98
• Marcella Targa: Il russo contemporaneo: breve analisi linguistica della rivista Kommersant' con l'aiuto del computer
• Antonella Bristot: Fonologia e Fonetica del Giapponese Moderno: Il ruolo innovativo dei Gairaigo

Academic Year 1998-99
• Guido Casiraghi: L'analisi automatica delle struttura sintattiche della lingua cinese

Academic Year 2000-01
• Felicia Guarini: Problemstellungen von Interferenz und Sprachuebertragung im Bereich DaF
• Antonia Marino: Automatische Fehleranalyse der deutschen Sprache. Ein Verfahrensansatz
• Giovanna Solinas: Il Ritmo del Cinese: un’Ipotesi Sperimentale

Academic Year 2001-02
• Beatrice Facchini: Das Diktat als Pruefungstest DaF fuer Italiener
• Giorgia Bortolato: Kontrastive Analyse (Deutsch Italienish) der Intonation nach ToBI
• Rachele de Nicola: Automatic Summarizing: Evaluations and Methods

Academic Year 2005-06
• Ivana Fratter: Dal CLISSE alla Treebank per l’analisi di costituenti nei testi di apprendenti l’taliano come L2.

Academic Year 2006-07
• Suhel Jaber: Sarrif! Un software per la verifica della conoscenza delle strutture verbali arabe
• Laura Saccarelli: un porting per SLIM – Software Linguistico Interattivo Multimediale per l’apprendimento della lingua inglese

Academic Year 2007-08
• Gloria Voltolina: Il dialogo nell’interazione uomo-macchina.

Academic Year 2008-09
• Rocco Tripodi: Natural Language Processing: un approccio tramite ontologie informatiche.

Since 2016 he is retired. His research work focuses on poetry and Artificial intelligence. He improves his system of poetry reading SPARSAR for English poetry to produce SSML output which includes specialized intonational instructions automatically and uses it to produce a reading of most of Shakespeare's sonnets. This are uploaded to accompany an important paper for the Handbook of Mathematical Cognition where he has been named co-editor for the section Linguistics and Cognition, by the title Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading. He starts working together with Nicolò Busetto now at Meta on the use of LLMs for text predictions using however test sets from Italian poetry. 

In 2021 he is invited to open the conference of the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics with a speech illustrating and narrating how Computational Linguistics was started in Venice in the '70s thanks to his passion and hard work. He publishes a number of papers on Deep Neural Networks and their inability to understand natural language one of which is accepted for presentation at the conference of the Association of Artificial intelligence.

In 2022 publishes a fully revised version of the chapter of his PhD thesis on Francis Webb with a new chapter introducing the algorithm for Sound Sense Harmony. This algorithm is then extensively presented in a paper published in 2023 where both Webb and Shakespeare were used to confirm its ability to set apart harmonic from disharmonic poems