Although the research area dealing with building, sharing and exploiting linguistic resources and tools for automatic processing of Latin (and, more generally, of ancient languages) has seen a large growth across the last decade, linguistic resources for Latin are still not interoperable. This means that linguistic information is split up in many products that just do not talk to each other. Such a situation results in poor exploitation of the richness provided by all those digital objects for Latin that were produced across years of work. Since Latin is a dead language (thus missing native speakers), all we can and must do is to exploit to the best the information contained in those few and precious texts that survived from the past. This means: - to make the best possible organization and use of the available linguistic resources for Latin (enhanced with web-services for Natural Language Processing – NLP –) for a fruitful integration of the information they provide, i.e. to retrieve and combine information from different sources in the most efficient way; - to make it available linguistic resources whose quality is assessed (curated data sets). The objective of the LiLa project is to connect and, ultimately, to exploit the wealth of linguistic resources and NLP tools for Latin assembled so far, in order to bridge the gap between raw language data, NLP and knowledge descriptions, thus enabling scholars to exploit to the best the currently available resources and tools. To address such a challenge, LiLa intends to incorporate the linguistic resources for Latin into the Linked Data framework, making it possible for them to be published and interlinked on the web and to interact with each other. To this aim, the project will build an open-ended knowledge base for Latin by using the Linked Data paradigm to combine data from disparate linguistic resources, provide NLP web-services and include also Latin into the multilingual Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.

The Popularitas project aims to provide a comprehensive study of the precedents of populism in ancient Rome. The Latin adjective popularis had a passive meaning (the man who enjoys the favour of the people), but also an active one (the man who seeks the favour of the people). Sometimes this active meaning was employed in connection with ambitious outsiders, wannabe “charismatic” leaders, who took a perspective hostile to the senatorial elite, claimed to have a direct connection with the people, and exploited this connection in order to bypass the institutions, to subvert the constitutional rules, and to gain power. The object of the project is precisely this political attitude, where the legitimate seeking of consensus turned into populism: what are the similarities and differences between ancient and contemporary populism? how far the allegations against ancient populists were well-founded? did populistic attitudes have ideological implications? to what extent populistic methods were effective? what was the people’s feedback? The main output of the project will be the publication of a monograph on the populism in ancient Rome and of three scientific papers; a two-days international conference on “ancient and modern populisms”, open to classicists, modern historians, and political scientists; a course of lectures on the ancient populism in the secondary schools; the creation of an internet site, intended both for scientific and educational use. The Popularitas project will historicize for the first time a much-discussed political phenomenon of our time and highlight similarities (and differences) with the ancient political practice. It will provide the tools for a diachronic assessment of modern populism, opening new research prospects. Its ambition is not only to be useful to the historians of the ancient world, but also to offer to political scientists and sociologist some fresh material and a new starting point for a proper understanding of the phenomenon.

The aim of MOLOR—Morphologically Linked Old Irish Resource—is to make Old Irish distributed lexical resources interact by using state-of-the-art data models and lexicographic standards based on the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) principles. On the basis of the 8th-century Old Irish Würzburg glosses, MOLOR will fully exploit a set of existing (both textual and lexical) resources by linking the text with a full-form lexicon containing both normalised and variant spellings as well as phonological representations. The integration of resources will benefit many different stakeholders, including lexicographers, philologists, and students, who currently work with inadequate and fragmented resources for a language with a highly complex morphology and an inconsistent and opaque orthography. Thanks to the internationally recognised expertise of the host institution, the applicant will be at the forefront of developments in LLOD and language processing for ancient languages. As a result of the envisaged mutual knowledge transfer, MOLOR is not only expected to lead to a novel standard in resource creation and interlinking for Old Irish, but it will also substantially contribute to and improve language-independent lexicographic data formats and ontologies, as such being applicable to any language and any domain. Finally, the fellowship will significantly improve the applicant’s skillset and employability due to increased interdisciplinary expertise at the intersection of the Humanities and Technology, and the fostering of new partnerships on resource creation and streamlining for ancient Indo-European languages.