# Roberto 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, where he is also the director of the Sapienza NLP Group. 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. 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 (LLMs), leading the Minerva project, the first Italian effort for pretraining a LLM from scratch.

## Education

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. Navigli's doctoral thesis focused on devising and evaluating an innovative knowledge-based algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation, named Structural Semantic Interconnections.

## Career and research

Navigli was a visiting research fellow and visiting professor of the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, the University of Sussex, the University of Wolverhampton and the Center for Advanced Studies of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich 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. Between 2017 and 2023, Navigli served as a member of the ERC Starting Grant panel for Computer Science and Informatics (PE6).
Navigli was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to fund his work on the creation of BabelNet and multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation, most notably Babelfy, and a subsequent ERC Consolidator Grant 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'. These two grants have been highlighted among the 15 projects through which the ERC transformed science.
In 2016, Navigli founded Babelscape, a successful university spinoff company, focused on multilingual neuro-symbolic Natural Language Understanding.

### Awards

* AAAI Fellow "for significant contributions to multilingual Natural Language Understanding, and development of widely recognized methods for knowledge resource construction, text disambiguation, and semantic parsing."
* 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"
* Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS)
* ACL Fellow "for significant contributions to multilingual lexical-semantic resources and a unifying vision for multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics"
* Winner of an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024, ACL 2023 and NAACL 2021
* 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."
* Winner of the Best Resource Paper Award at ACL 2022
* 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."
* META Prize 2015 "for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers through a multilingual lexicalised semantic network and ontology making use of heterogeneous data sources"
* Marco Somalvico AIxIA [it] 2013 Biannual Prize awarded to the best young Italian researcher in AI
* Marco Cadoli AIxIA [it] 2007 Prize for the Best Ph.D. Thesis in AI

### Selected publications

* Roberto Navigli, Marco Pinto, Pasquale Silvestri, Dennis Rotondi, Simone Ciciliano, Alessandro Scirè. 2024. NounAtlas: Filling the Gap in Nominal Semantic Role Labeling. Proceedings of ACL, pp. 16245-16258. ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper Award.
* Simone Tedeschi, Johan Bos, Thierry Declerck, Jan Hajic, Daniel Hershcovich, Eduard H. Hovy, Alexander Koller, Simon Krek, Steven Schockaert, Rico Sennrich, Ekaterina Shutova, Roberto Navigli. What's the Meaning of Superhuman Performance in Today's NLU? Proceedings of ACL 2023, pp. 12471-12491. ACL 2023 Outstanding Paper Award.
* Niccolò Campolungo, Federico Martelli, Francesco Saina, Roberto Navigli. 2022. DiBiMT: A Novel Benchmark for Measuring Word Sense Disambiguation Biases in Machine Translation. Proceedings of ACL 2022, pp. 4331-4352. ACL 2022 Best Resource Paper Award.
* Simone Conia, Andrea Bacciu, Roberto Navigli. 2021. Unifying Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with Heterogeneous Linguistic Resources. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2021, pp. 338-351. NAACL 2021 Outstanding Paper Award.
* José Camacho-Collados, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Roberto Navigli. 2016. Nasari: Integrating explicit knowledge and corpus statistics for a multilingual representation of concepts and entities. Artificial Intelligence 240, pp. 36-64. Winner of the AIJ Prominent Paper Award.
* Roberto Navigli, Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2012. BabelNet: The automatic construction, evaluation and application of a wide-coverage multilingual semantic network. Artificial Intelligence 193, pp. 217-250. Winner of the AIJ Prominent Paper Award.