The Institute's activities can be subdivided into three main research topics:
- Bilingualism and multilingualism
- Specialised communication
- Language technologies
A reality like that of South Tyrol's population, which is characterized by three different linguistic and cultural groups, offers a panorama of great interest for the study of phenomena related to language learning and language contact. What issues pertain to the learning of more than one foreign language? Which tools are best suited for the analysis and evaluation of language competence? Why do some people learn a foreign language more easily than others? In what way can new technologies support language learning?
These are some of the fundamental questions addressed by the research topic "Bilingualism and multilingualism". The projects involve the analysis of linguistic proficiency and focus in particular on the related psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects. Moreover, the methodologies of computer-assisted lexicography and the development of new material for learning German, Italian and the Italian Sign Language give new impulse to the study of foreign language learning.
Finally, interaction with computational linguistics provides an important contribution through the application of the new technologies to language learning and the creation of personalised, user-friendly material.
A list of projects carried out the research group on bilingualism and multilingualism can be found here.
The fist projects carried out by the research group on "Specialised communication" focused on legal and administrative terminology in Italian and German. In more recent times, new fields and languages, such as Ladin and other languages of the Alpine arc (French and Slovene) have been explored. The experience gathered with multilingual terminology work was applied to some specific sectors, such as environment and spatial planning as well as university law.
The production of reference works on legal terminology remains a constant activity. Also, post-bachelor courses on all issues related to specialised translation, drafting, documentation and terminology are being held regularly. Currently new studies are being carried out, notably on the multilingual knowledge management in South Tyrolean businesses and on the need for specialised terminology of migrant workers and businessmen.
Such research is complemented by the resources offered by computational linguistics, especially corpus linguistics, which contributes with new methods of collection and analysis of texts, terminology extraction and concept representation.
A list of projects carried out the research group on specialised communication can be found here.
Most of the research carried out by the Institute applies methodologies developed in the field of computational linguistics. This holds true for the projects concerning both lexicography and terminology. In particular, corpus linguistics and approaches of data modeling and user adaptation are applied. By means of adaptive interfaces data access is customised to facilitate the processes of orientation and learning.
The activities of the Institute comprise the creation and use of monolingual and aligned multilingual corpora, the latter being special language corpora for the legal domain. Employed in terminology work the corpora also serve as an archive of data on the language and are consulted for the investigation of linguistic phenomena. Within all projects a special focus is put on the representation of data. Complex sets of data have to be arranged in a manner that guarantees flexible as well as user friendly data access. Their application in the field of computer-assisted language learning allows the user to benefit from a customised learning process as well as the online availability of the given resources.
A list of projects carried out the research group on language technologies can be found here.