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