Riccardo Amerigo Vigliermo

PhD student fellow

Research interests

Project Maktabah Catalogazione di testi in alfabeto non latino. Nuovi approcci tra digital humanities e IA (Progetto CLUSTER). Specifically, Vigliermo deals with OCR for Arabic alphabets and post-processing techniques, Arabic-Islamic onomastic and biographical dictionaries in digital library contexts, and treatment of non-Latin alphabets in library science.

Education, academic and professional experience

Since November 2024, she has been a Junior Research Fellow at FSCIRE and part of the Digital Maktaba project, which aims to build an intelligent semi-automatic cataloging system by automatically extracting cataloging metadata for texts in non-Latin alphabets. The project is part of ITSERR (Italian Strengthening of the ESFRI RI RESILIENCE)  the framework of the “Digital Maktaba: OCR e sistemi di catalogazione semiautomatica in alfabeti non latini” initiative. 

From 2021 to 2024, he pursued a PhD in Human Sciences with a focus on Digital Humanities and Digital Communication at the Department of Linguistic Studies at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE), working on his research project titled“Digital Maktaba: for an innovative multi-language cultural heritage preservation and management system”. 

Since November 2020, he has been collaborating with the start-up MIM.FSCIRE, with which he is running a project on Digital Humanities applied to Arabic. He won the competition organised by IFAB and Web Marketing Festival, as part of the “Premio Nazionale Ricerca Big Data e Artificial Intelligence WMF-IFAB – 1° Edizione”, for his research project Digital Maktaba.

In 2018, he completed his Master's degree with a thesis on the comparison of Quranic interpretations on Sayyd Quṭb and Yūsuf alQaraḍāwī regarding the ǧihād. Afterwards, he continued to deepen his linguistic and Islamic studies focusing on the application of Arabic and Persian language to artificial intelligence and in particular AI fields as Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

From 2016 to 2018, he attended L'Orientale University, in Naples. Simultaneously, he specialized in Arabic and Persian language and translation, and also completed an internship in Arabic language teaching.

He attended the Institute of Oriental Studies at Sapienza University of Rome from 2012 to 2015, where he graduated with honors working on a thesis on Islamic law regarding the use of the iǧtihād tool in the reform of the Moroccan Family Law Code. During his undergraduate studies, he also studied Arabic and Persian and received a scholarship for language enhancement at the Faculty of Al-Alsun, Ain Shams University in Cairo.

Featured publications

Martoglia, R., Sala, L., Vanzini, M., Vigliermo, R.A., A tool for semiautomatic cataloguing of an Islamic digital library: a use case from the Digital Maktaba project (short paper), Qurator 2022: 3rd Conference on Digital Curation Technologies, September 19-23, 2022, Berlin, Germany.

Bergamaschi, S.; De Nardis, S.; Martoglia, R.; Ruozzi, F.; Sala, L.; Vanzini, M.; Vigliermo, R.A., Novel Perspectives for the Management of Multilingual and Multialphabetic Heritages through Automatic Knowledge Extraction: The Digital Maktaba Approach, «Sensors», 22, 11, 3995, 2022.

Bergamaschi, S. & Martoglia, R. & Ruozzi, F. & Vigliermo, R.A. & De Nardis, S. & Sala, L. & Vanzini, M, Preserving and conserving culture: first steps towards a knowledge extractor and cataloguer for multilingual and multi-alphabetic heritages, GoodIT2021, 2021, Roma.