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Roberto Navigli

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Roberto Navigli
Alma mater
Known for
AwardsAAAI Fellow (2025)
ACL Fellow (2023)
ELLIS Fellow (2024)
EurAI Fellow (2024)
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsSapienza University of Rome
Doctoral advisors
Websitewww.diag.uniroma1.it/navigli

Roberto Navigli (born 1978) is an Italian computer scientist and professor in the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering "Antonio Ruberti" at the Sapienza University of Rome,[3] where he is also the director of the Sapienza NLP Group.[4]

Education

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Navigli obtained his Master of Science degree in Computer Science in 2001 at Sapienza University of Rome, followed, in 2007, by a PhD from the same institution, under the supervision of Paola Velardi.[2] Navigli's doctoral thesis focused on devising and evaluating an innovative knowledge-based algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation, named Structural Semantic Interconnections.[5]

Career and research

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Navigli's research focuses on Artificial Intelligence, specifically on enabling computers to understand and represent meaning across hundreds of languages, making significant contributions to various fields within Natural Language Processing, including Word Sense Disambiguation, Entity Linking, Semantic Role Labeling and semantic parsing.[1]

In 2011, Navigli was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant[6] to create BabelNet, a multilingual knowledge graph and "the largest lexicon/encyclopedia/thesaurus/reference work on the web"[7] that, using disambiguation algorithms, brings together knowledge from resources including WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata. BabelNet featured in a Time magazine article as a prototype of "dictionary of the future"[8]. Being based on the notion of multilingual synset, BabelNet provides the multilingual inventory that enables Word Sense Disambiguation algorithms, such as Babelfy, to work in hundreds of languages simultaneously.[7]

Navigli was later granted a subsequent ERC Consolidator Grant[9] to work on sentence-level, language-independent semantic representations, leading to the BabelNet Meaning Representation and its semantic parser, with the goal of creating 'the DNA of language'.[10] These two ERC grants have been highlighted among the 15 projects through which the ERC transformed science.[11][12][13] In 2024, together with Nobel Prize laureate Anne L'Huillier and Patrik Verstreken, he opened the European Union Research and Innovation Week[14][15].

In 2016, Navigli founded Babelscape,[16] a university spinoff company, focused on multilingual neuro-symbolic Natural Language Understanding.[17] In 2025, he led the Babelscape team responsible for the development and production of the language capabilities of the robot Adriano, created for the Rome Chamber of Commerce, and referred to as "the first robotic employee in the public administration."[18][19].

In the field of generative artificial intelligence[20], he leads the development of Minerva, the first Large Language Model to be both pretrained from scratch[21][22] and instructed in Italian[23][24].

From 2013 to 2020, he was Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal.[25] In 2025, he is General Chair of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.[26]

Awards

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  • AAAI Fellow, 2025, "for significant contributions to multilingual Natural Language Understanding, and development of widely recognized methods for knowledge resource construction, text disambiguation, and semantic parsing."[27]
  • EurAI Fellow, 2024, "for his seminal contributions to various areas of Natural Language Processing, including his pioneering work on multilingual and cross-lingual Natural Language Understanding"[28][29]
  • ELLIS Fellow, 2024, European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems, awarded to "high-caliber scientists advancing the field"[30]
  • ACL Fellow, 2023, "for significant contributions to multilingual lexical-semantic resources and a unifying vision for multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics"[31]
  • Winner of an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024,[32] ACL 2023[33] and NAACL 2021[34]
  • Winner of the 2023 Artificial Intelligence Journal Prominent Paper Award "for outstanding contributions to the multilingual representation of meanings in the form of lexical and semantic, latent and explicit vectors."[35]
  • Winner of the Best Resource Paper Award at ACL 2022[36]
  • Winner of the 2017 Artificial Intelligence Journal Prominent Paper Award for "outstanding contributions to the automatic construction of large knowledge bases and semantic networks from public domain sources such as Wikipedia and WordNet."[35]
  • META Prize 2015 "for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers through a multilingual lexicalised semantic network and ontology making use of heterogeneous data sources"[37]
  • Marco Somalvico AIxIA [it] 2013 Biannual Prize awarded to the best young Italian researcher in AI[38]
  • Marco Cadoli AIxIA [it] 2007 Prize for the Best Ph.D. Thesis in AI[39]

Selected publications

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References

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  1. ^ a b Roberto Navigli publications indexed by Google Scholar
  2. ^ a b "Roberto Navigli's institutional page - Publications".
  3. ^ "Official DIAG Sapienza Page" (in Italian). Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  4. ^ "Sapienza NLP Page". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  5. ^ Navigli, Roberto; Velardi, Paola (2005). "Structural Semantic Interconnections: A Knowledge-Based Approach to Word Sense Disambiguation". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 27 (7): 1075–1086. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2005.149. PMID 16013755. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  6. ^ "MultiJEDI on CORDIS". CORDIS. Retrieved 2024-08-24.
  7. ^ a b Dickson, Andrew (23 February 2018). "Inside the OED: can the world's biggest dictionary survive the internet?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  8. ^ Steinmetz, Katy (12 May 2016). "Redefining the Modern Dictionary". Time. pp. 20–21. Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  9. ^ "MOUSSE". CORDIS. Retrieved 2024-08-24.
  10. ^ "Project breaks new grounds in AI to create 'DNA of language'". CORDIS.
  11. ^ "How the ERC transformed science". European Research Council. Retrieved 2024-08-24.
  12. ^ "#ERC 10k Grantees: European Research Council celebrates 10,000 research awards". Sapienza. 28 April 2021. Retrieved 2024-04-27.
  13. ^ How the ERC Transformed Science: Interview with Roberto Navigli. European Research Council.
  14. ^ "Opening of the Research and Innovation Week 2024". 18 March 2024. Retrieved 2025-04-26.
  15. ^ "ERC at EU Research and Innovation Week 2024". 18 March 2024. Retrieved 2025-04-26.
  16. ^ "Babelscape - about".
  17. ^ "Dalla ricerca arriva l'IA tutta made in Italy" (in Italian). 24 October 2024. Retrieved 2024-11-06.
  18. ^ "Arriva ADRIANO, il primo dipendente robotico della pubblica amministrazione" (in Italian). Il Sole 24 Ore. 19 March 2025. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  19. ^ "Presentato primo dipendente robot della pubblica amministrazione" (in Italian). ANSA. 19 March 2025. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  20. ^ "Roberto Navigli, il professore che lavora alla Gen AI italiana" (in Italian). Fortune Italia. 18 September 2024. Retrieved 2025-04-19.
  21. ^ "Ecco Minerva, la prima famiglia di LLM addestrati da zero in italiano" (in Italian). 23 April 2024. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  22. ^ "Minerva, il nuovo modello di intelligenza artificiale con 500 miliardi di parole" (in Italian). Rainews. 30 April 2024. Retrieved 2025-04-19.
  23. ^ "Minerva". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  24. ^ "Minerva 7B, l'IA generativa italiana è diventata grande" (in Italian). 26 November 2024. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  25. ^ "Navigli's institutional page". Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  26. ^ "Organizing committee of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)".
  27. ^ "Elected AAAI Fellows".
  28. ^ "Current EurAI Fellows".
  29. ^ "EurAI Fellow motivation on X". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  30. ^ https://ellis.eu/fellows. Retrieved 2024-12-04. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  31. ^ "Current ACL Fellows".
  32. ^ a b "ACL 2024 best paper awards".
  33. ^ a b "ACL 2023 best paper awards".
  34. ^ a b "NAACL 2021 best paper awards". 2 June 2021.
  35. ^ a b c d "AIJ Awards: List of Current and Previous Winners".
  36. ^ a b "Sapienza DIAG ACL 2022 best resource paper announcement".
  37. ^ "META Prize page". Archived from the original on 2023-03-06.
  38. ^ "Marco Somalvico awards page".
  39. ^ "Marco Cadoli awards page".
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