Subject areaCommunication sciences
Also known asFather Roberto Busa
Father Roberto Busa (Vicenza, 1913 - Gallarate, 2011) was an Italian Jesuit, linguist and computer scientist, regarded as the pioneer of digital humanities (using computers to study texts, languages and cultural works) and of computational linguistics (the discipline that teaches machines to analyse language).
His work is the Index Thomisticus: the lemmatisation, that is reducing each word to its dictionary form, of the entire works of Thomas Aquinas and related texts. To achieve it, in the late 1940s, Busa persuaded IBM to put its punched-card machines at the service of a philology project, and the work lasted decades until the electronic edition.
He taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, at the Aloisianum in Gallarate and at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Text search engines, concordance tools and, further down the line, the tools that analyse language with artificial intelligence today all descend from that insight.
Source: Wikidata Q718355 e Wikipedia, voce Roberto Busa, consultate il 04/11/2026.
An example
The following case is constructed. A chemical company that has a machine analyse thousands of technical data sheets to find recurring terms is using, with today's tools, the idea Busa first applied to the texts of Thomas Aquinas.
broader entriesthis entry and narrowertwo levels down← up · → down
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