History of the division

The IRST research activities in this area started in 1988, when the Natural Language Processing laboratory (under Oliviero Stock's guidance) and the Human Factors laboratory (under Jon Slack's guidance) were established.
In November 1989, IRST organized the First Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA'89).
In this period the ALFresco Project was initiated.

In April 1992, IRST organized the Third Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (ANLP'92). During 1992
Jon Slack left IRST and the Human Factors activities were incorporated into those of the Natural Language Processing laboratory.

In 1994 the laboratory began to partecipate in EU-funded projects:
LRE-GIST (1994-96), LRE-TRANSTERM (1994-95), MLAP-TAMIC (1995), LE-FACILE (1996-98), LE-TAMIC-P (1997-98), HIPS (1997-2000), NESPOLE! (2000-02), Renaissance (2000-01), Class (2000-01), M-PIRO (2000-02), MEANING (2002-05),
Dot.kom (2002-05), PF-STAR (2002-04), PATExpert (2006-2008), X-Media (2006-2010), QALL-ME (2006-2009).

It has also been participating in projects funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento:
Edamok, Webfaq, ONTOTEXT (2005-2007).

Since 1994 the group has been working on the Italian version of WordNet (first within the ILEX project and more recently within the project MultiWordNet - Italian WordNet). In 1995, IRST joined the C-STAR consortium.

In February 2000, IRST hosted the Sixth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT 2000) and, in
August 2000, the International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems (AH 2000).

During 2002, IRST hosted The April Fools' Day Workshop on Computational Humour and ESSLLI 2002.

In October 2005, IRST hosted the Seventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI-2005) and, in April 2006, the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-2006).