Vito Pirrelli - Biography#

Vito Pirrelli is Research Manager at the National Research Council Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa since 2003, and co-founder and head of the Communication Physiology Lab. He currently teaches Computational Psycholinguistics at the University of Pisa. He is co-editor in chief of the linguistic journal "Lingue e Linguaggio" and has recently been appointed for the editorship of "The Mental Lexicon". He also taught Computational Linguistics at the University of Pavia, Lexical Semantics at the University of Bologna, and General Linguistics at Salford University.

His main research interests include theoretical morphology (with a pioneering study on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of stem allomorphy in Italian verb inflection), analogy-based machine language learning and processing, and computer models of the lexicon self-organization and access with recurrent topological neural networks.

As the chair of NetWordS, the European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme on Word Structure in the Languages of Europe, he directed an interdisciplinary research programme on the Mental Lexicon, involving 16 countries and more than 40 European labs (http://www.networds-esf.eu/). He also promoted the teaching of Italian as a foreign language by coordinating the development of the first open-access corpus of 250 million tokens of contemporary Italian (Paisà), with an accessible interface for querying and downloading syntactically-annotated corpus excerpts.

Currently, he is the project coordinator of ReadLet, an ICT screening platform, based on portable technology and cloud computing, which monitors the development of reading skills of early graders with both Latin and non Latin script languages.