Contributor, Northeast Asian Studies
Marco La Marra is a researcher working at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. He holds a BA in Foreign Languages and Cultures from the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” where he conducted his thesis research on historical Chinese linguistics and Middle Chinese. He is currently completing an MSc in Computational Modeling of Language and Cognition at the University of Trento.
His research interests include computational approaches to Chinese and Japanese languages and literatures, with a particular focus on historical linguistics, Classical Chinese and Classical Japanese, and premodern China and Japan. His interests in pre-modern China span the period from the Han to the Song dynasties, while his work on Japan focuses particularly on the Heian, Kamakura, and Muromachi periods. He is also interested in contemporary NLP challenges for Asian languages, such as NLP for low resource languages and multilingual LLM tokenization.
More broadly, his work and interests also extended to cognitive robotics, neuro-inspired AI, and language acquisition, with a focus on understanding language and intelligent behaviour from both computational and cognitive perspectives.