Dear Colleagues,
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Rodolfo Delmonte,
Retired Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He passed away
suddenly on Thursday, March 12, at the age of 79.
He graduated in 1973 at the University of Venice in Foreign Languages and
Literatures and immediately after his graduation won a European-Australian
Award. It allowed him to start his research career spending one year at the
University of Melbourne working on one of the first computational
approaches to 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 on a pioneering speech synthesis application to encode
Italian linguistic information and use it for the generation of speech from
text with unlimited vocabulary. He was at the origin of many successful
tools for automatic processing and analysis of Italian and English covering
all layers of language. He dedicated his entire life to computational
linguistics, continuing his work after retirement and keeping fruitful
relations with colleagues and friends.
Above all, those who had the opportunity to meet him, know how kind and
warm-hearted he was. His friendly attitude inspired many of us in our
careers. This will always be remembered with deep gratitude.
We will gather on March 18, 2026, at 11:00 in the Sala Laica of the San
Michele in Isola cemetery (Venice) to say our final farewell to Rodolfo.
Sara Tonelli and Rocco Tripodi