The Research Centre

The CIRCSE is a pluri- and interdisciplinary research centre of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy). The main research interests of the centre are in the field of natural language processing and information extraction from written language texts in electronic form. The texts can be in ancient or modern languages and belong to different areas and genres.

Beside computational linguistics, the research areas covered by the works of the CIRCSE are philosophy of language and those specific expertises that are required by the individual texts to be processed (presently, mostly focussed on the philosophical area).

The CIRCSE is the official acknowledgement of the former GIRCSE (Gruppo Interdisciplinare di Ricerche per la Computerizzazione dei Segni dell'Espressione), which was started by Roberto Busa SJ, author of the Index Thomisticus and pioneer in the usage of computers for linguistic and literary analysis (here a video on father Busa presented at ICHoLS XV: International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, Milan 23-27 August 2021). The GIRCSE was strictly connected to the workshops on computer & humanities held by Busa at the Università Cattolica since 1978. Being active since the beginning of the ‘80s, the GIRCSE was one of the first research groups on computational linguistics ever founded in Italy. The research group was supported by the late director of the Institute of Glottology, Prof. Giancarlo Bolognesi. Nowadays, the CIRCSE is still hosted by the Institute of Glottology.

The CIRCSE activities are linked with the scientific community working on language resources both at national and international level.