Antonio Zampolli was Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Pisa, where he was responsible for the foundation, in 1968, and directorship of the Linguistic Division of CNUCE, later to become the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, an institute of the University of Pisa, within the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR).

His main research interests lay in literary and linguistic text analysis, mathematical methods in humanities, digital language resources, multimodality, standards for literary and linguistic data processing, computational lexicology and lexicography, modalities and strategies for international co-operation.

Professor Zampolli's enormous contribution to computational linguistics and the larger field of humanities computing is well attested by the enormous scope of his involvement in key organisations. He was one of the founders of the ALLC and served on its committee from its founding in 1973; he was President from 1983 until the time of his death. In addition, Antonio Zampolli served as vice-president of the Association for Humanities Computing (ACH) and l'Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA); was a past president of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX); was the founder of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the chair of the ELRA Board and of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC); was director of the Pisa International Summer School for Literary and Linguistic Computing; was a member of the Steering Committee of TEI; member of the European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies (ELSNET) Management Board and of several committees of experts for the EU; was a past subject representative for literary and linguistic computing of the Permanent Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation; co-ordinator of several European projects for the production of language resources, including the current standardisation International Standards for Language Engineering (ISLE) extension of the Experts Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES) jointly funded by the NSF and the EU; responsible for software development of the national project for La Biblioteca Italiana Telematica (CIBIT) and co-ordinator of two Italian national projects: "National infrastructure for the linguistic resources in the field of automatic processing of written and oral natural language" and "Computational Linguistics: mono and multilingual researches".

A personal memoir and tribute by Michael Sperberg-McQueen can be seen here.