Torruella CasaÑas, Joan

Biography

Joan Torruella holds a PhD in Linguistics by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Masters in Philosophy by the University of Manchester, and a Masters in Lexicography by the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He obtained a research grant by the Ministero degli Affari Esteri of Italy to conduct research on Romance Studies at the University of Florence. Later he worked at the University of Manchester as a Lecturer of Spanish and Catalan, while in turn he conducted his Masters in Philosophy. He has worked on a wide range of computing tools and resources in collaboration with the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche in Pisa (Italy). He is ICREA Research Professor since January 2005. He is also co-director of the journal "Scriptum Digital" and a member of the Seminar of Philology and Computer Science. In 2009 he was awarded the Research Excellence Prize (PREI 2008).

Research Interest

My work consists of the research in the mediaeval Hispanic lexicon and of the development and application of new computer tools in order to understand and describe the process of language from real and quantifiable datum extracted from balanced corpora. At this moment I am working in contrastive studies among different Hispanic languages and in the realization of a corpus of texts of the Catalan language previous to the XVII century (Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic). I am also working in the development of a portal in internet with scientific information about the lexicon of the Ibero-Romance languages (Portal de Léxico Hispánico). I'm currently working on those projects: development of a semi-automatic lemmatisator of the Old Catalan language; study of how to measure the lexical richness of the texts and the preparation of a computer program to do it, and a corpus of notarial documents written in Castilian language in Catalonia in the XVIII century.