Prof. Cristiano Chesi

IUSS Pavia

Cristiano Chesi (1975, Pisa) is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS Pavia) and Director of NeTS (IUSS Laboratory for Neurolinguistics, Computational Linguistics and theoretical Syntax) since September 2016.

Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences at University of Siena (2005) and researcher in the same university at CISCL (Interdepartmental Center for Cognitive Studies of Language) as Computational Linguist. His research areas are Computational Linguistics (grammatical formalisms, complexity theory, Parsing and Machine Translation), Language Acquisition and Linguistic Disabilities (deafness, aphasia and SLI).

He collaborated with the Microsoft Language Development Center (Lisbon); Marie Curie Fellowship in 2004 at City University of London, Erasmus professor at University of Geneva, Visiting Scholar at MediaLab and Dep. of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT (Cambridge, MA), Visiting student at IRST (Institute for Scientific and Technological Research of Trento), Erasmus student at University of Rennes II (France).

Among various projects, he developed an on-line "Italian" > "Italian Sign Language" Machine Translation service and an aligned, fully annotated, corpus with a visual editing tool for semi-automatic tagging of new linguistic data (Centro Ricerche RAI, public broadcast television, Siena University Treebank ), a demo parser for Italian (Phase-based Minimalist Parser) based on a (minimalist, in the sense of Chomsky 1995) grammatical framework dubbed "Phase-based Minimalist Grammar" (PMG, Chesi 2007). A related project is dubbed Top-Down Left-Right Grammars, recently evolved into Expectaion-based Minimalist Grammars (e-MG, Chesi 2022, 23) framework. He is currently the coordinator of the T-GRA2L project: Testing GRAdeness and GRAmmaticality in Linguistics.

Projects

• Testing GRAdeness and GRAmmaticality in Linguistics (October 2022 - September 2025)
• Fundamental research on language in the service of the Italian language (2008 - 2011)
• Machine Translation from Italian to LIS (2008 - 2009)

Resources

• Siena University Treebank (2010)
• Italian to Italian Sign Language Machine Translation Toolkit (2009)
• XML Tree Editor (2009)
• Cartographical Parser (2004)
• Parsing Algorithms benchmark (2004)
• CHILDES Web Interface (2003)

Seminars

• 26-4-2001 Alcune osservazioni su predicati, nomi e (im)possibilità 
• 8-6-2004 Modelli computazionali minimali (e cartografici)
• 8-5-2007 Rightward ’movements’ from a Top-Down perspective: Extraposition and Heavy NP-shift
  Attached materials: chesi-2007-05-08-extraposition-NP-shift.pdf [175.89 KB]
• 10-7-2007 Covert movements from a Top-Down perspective: QR
  Attached materials: chesi-2007-07-10-QR.pdf [300.41 KB]
• 12-5-2023 Who's afraid of ChatGPT: some linguistic considerations
  Attached materials: 2023 - who s afraid of ChatGPT - chesi UNISI.pdf [4700.1 KB]
• 30-1-2025 Agreement and D-linking: an introduction to T-GRA2L

external personal web page