Roberto Navigli
Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Professor of Natural Language Processing, Università La Sapienza

Roberto Navigli is Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Sapienza University of Rome,where he leads the Sapienza NLP Group, and a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, ELLIS and EurAI. He has received two prestigious ERC grants in AI on multilingual word sense disambiguation (2011-2016) and multilingual language - andsyntax-independent open-text unified representations (2017-2022), highlighted among the 15 projects throughwhich the ERC transformed science. At the core of his research liesthe goal of making semantic representations of words and sentences independentof the language in which they are written. More recently, he has focused on Large Language Models (LLMs), leading the Minerva LLM project, the first Italian effort for pretraining an LLM from scratch.

In2015 he received the META prize for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers with BabelNet, a project also highlighted in The Guardian and Time magazine, and recipient of the Artificial Intelligence Journal prominent paper award 2017 (and a subsequent AIJ prominent paper award in 2023 on the NASARI sense embeddings), as well as abest resource paper award at ACL 2022 and several outstanding paper awards from NAACL and ACL. He is the co-founder of Babelscape, a successful deep-tech company which enables NLU in dozens of languages. He served as Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (2013-2020) and Program Chair of ACL-IJCNLP2021. He currently serves as General Chair of ACL 2025.