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Roberto Navigli

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Roberto Navigli
Alma mater
AwardsACL Fellow (2023)
EurAI Fellow (2024)
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsSapienza University of Rome
Thesis Structural Semantic Interconnections: a Knowledge-Based WSD Algorithm, its Evaluation and Applications  (2007)
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] His 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] He created BabelNet, a multilingual knowledge graph that brings together knowledge from resources including WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata. At the core of his research lies the goal of making semantic representations of words and sentences independent of the language in which they are written. More recently, he has focused on Large Language Models, leading the Minerva LLM project,[5][6] the first Italian effort for pretraining a LLM from scratch.[7]

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.[8]

Career and research

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During and after his doctorate, Navigli was a Visiting Research Fellow and Visiting Professor[9] of the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, working with Prof. Mirella Lapata, the University of Sussex, invited by Dr. Diana McCarthy, the University of Wolverhampton with Prof. Ruslan Mitkov, and the Center for Advanced Studies of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, invited by Prof. Hinrich Schütze [de].[10] He then obtained academic positions as researcher, and later Associate and Full Professor, at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he established the Sapienza NLP group.[11] Between 2017 and 2023, Navigli served as a member of the ERC Starting Grant panel for Computer Science and Informatics (PE6).[12]

Navigli was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant[13] to fund his work on the creation of BabelNet and multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation, most notably Babelfy, and a subsequent ERC Consolidator Grant[14] 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'.[15] These two grants, amounting to overall 2.9M€, have been highlighted among the 15 projects through which the ERC transformed science.[16]

In 2016, Navigli founded Babelscape,[17] a successful university spinoff company, focused on multilingual neuro-symbolic Natural Language Understanding.[18]

Awards

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  • EurAI Fellow "for his seminal contributions to various areas of Natural Language Processing, including his pioneering work on multilingual and cross-lingual Natural Language Understanding"[19][20]
  • Winner of an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024[21]
  • ACL Fellow "for significant contributions to multilingual lexical-semantic resources and a unifying vision for multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics"[22]
  • 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."[23]
  • Winner of an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023[24]
  • Winner of the Best Resource Paper Award at ACL 2022[25]
  • Winner of an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2021[26]
  • 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."[23]
  • META Prize 2015 "for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers through a multilingual lexicalised semantic network and ontology making use of heterogeneous data sources"[27]
  • Marco Somalvico AIxIA [it] 2013 Biannual Prize awarded to the best young Italian researcher in AI[28]
  • Marco Cadoli AIxIA [it] 2007 Prize for the Best Ph.D. Thesis in AI[29]

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" (in Italian). Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  5. ^ "Minerva". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  6. ^ "Minerva 7B, l'IA generativa italiana è diventata grande" (in Italian). 26 November 2024. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  7. ^ "Ecco Minerva, la prima famiglia di LLM addestrati da zero in italiano" (in Italian). 23 April 2024. Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ "Roberto Navigli's institutional page - CV".
  10. ^ "Visiting fellow". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  11. ^ "Sapienza NLP page".
  12. ^ "ERC Starting Grant Panels 2023" (PDF). Retrieved 2024-11-03., "ERC Starting Grant Panels 2021" (PDF). Retrieved 2024-11-03., "ERC Starting Grant Panels 2019" (PDF). Retrieved 2024-11-03., "ERC Starting Grant Panels 2017" (PDF). Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  13. ^ "MultiJEDI on CORDIS". CORDIS. Retrieved 2024-08-24.
  14. ^ "MOUSSE". CORDIS. Retrieved 2024-08-24.
  15. ^ "Project breaks new grounds in AI to create 'DNA of language'".
  16. ^ "How the ERC transformed science". Retrieved 2024-08-24.
  17. ^ "Babelscape - about".
  18. ^ "Dalla ricerca arriva l'IA tutta made in Italy" (in Italian). 24 October 2024. Retrieved 2024-11-06.
  19. ^ "Current EurAI Fellows".
  20. ^ "EurAI Fellow motivation on X". Retrieved 2024-11-03.
  21. ^ a b "ACL 2024 best paper awards".
  22. ^ "Current ACL Fellows".
  23. ^ a b c d "AIJ Awards: List of Current and Previous Winners".
  24. ^ a b "ACL 2023 best paper awards".
  25. ^ a b "Sapienza DIAG ACL 2022 best resource paper announcement".
  26. ^ a b "NAACL 2021 best paper awards". 2 June 2021.
  27. ^ "META Prize page". Archived from the original on 2023-03-06.
  28. ^ "Marco Somalvico awards page".
  29. ^ "Marco Cadoli awards page".
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