Roberto Zamparelli

Roberto Zamparelli è ricercatore del dipartimento di scienze della cognizione e della formazione ed è membro del CLIC, il Language, Interaction and Computation Lab, del CIMeC.

Main interests

I am a linguist, interested in the relationship and interaction between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge, in the application of empirical evidence in theoretical linguistics and in linguistic methodology in general.

I have worked extensively in the analysis of noun phrases, in particular: adjectives, determiners and their properties, kind-denoting noun phrases across languages. In the last 8 years I have also worked extensively on coordination and correlatives and their linguistic properties, on sentential arguments, on compounding, and on various aspects of lexical semantics.

Research areas and projects

Theoretical and experimental linguistics

I am currently involved in a large-scale research project (with Marco Baroni and Raffaella Bernardi) on the possibility of extending distributional vector-space semantic models of meaning beyond the lexicon. The goal is to use machine learning techniques over words cooccurrence vectors extracted from very large corpora to capture the (partially) compositional way in which the meanings of complex linguistic constituents (in particular, Adj+Noun, Det+Noun, N+N compounds) are derived from the meaning of their parts. See the ESSLLI 2010 Workshop on Compositionality and Distributional Semantic Models for further information.

Other project (in collaboration with Graham Katz, University of Washington) has the goal of combining distributional, corpus-based techniques and formal semantic analysis to caracterize the meaning of various classes of abstract nouns (in particular group nouns, abstract mass nouns and kind-denoting expressions).

A third project, funded as part of the Italian PRIN grant initiative, concerns the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of gender and other nominal features.