Keynote speakers

Rada Mihalcea - Unversity of Michigan

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences.

She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for EMNLP 2009 and ACL 2011, and a general chair for NAACL 2015 and *SEM 2019.

She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2013), and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).

Marco Passarotti - Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan

Marco Passarotti is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy), where he is Director of the CIRCSE Research Centre and Coordinator of the MA in Linguistic Computing.

His main research interests deal with building, using and disseminating linguistic resources and natural language processing tools for Latin.

A former pupil of one of the pioneers of humanities computing, father Roberto Busa SJ, since 2006 he has headed the Index Thomisticus Treebank project. Between 2018 and 2023, he was the principal investigator of the LiLa project, an ERC-Consolidator Grant that built a Linked Data Knowledge Base of interoperable linguistic resources for Latin. He authored around 200 publications.

Piek Vossen - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Prof. Dr. P.Th.J.M. (Piek) Vossen is full Professor of Computational Lexicology at the VU University Amsterdam, Head of the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab (CLTL) and co-founder of the Global WordNet Assocation in 2000 ( GWA ).

In 2013 he won the prestigious Spinoza Award of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and in 2015 he has been honoured by the Dutch Royal House as a “Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion”. He is also a member the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) and the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen ( KHMW ).

Piek Vossen studied Dutch and General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and received his PhD (cum laude) in Linguistics on Computational Lexicology and Lexicography.

He is/has been involved in many national and international projects, among which: Acquilex, EuroWordNet, Meaning, Cornetto, DutchSemCor, KYOTO and Global WordNet Grid. In one of his latest projects NewsReader he developed the ‘History Recorder’, a computer program that ‘reads’ the news each day and precisely records what happened when and where in the world and who was involved. Furthermore he developed 4 research projects with his Spinoza-price: “Understanding of Language by Machines – an escape from the world of language”, plus 2 follow up research projects on  Make Robots Talk & Think (Leolani) . He is one of the principal investigators of the Gravity project Hybrid Intelligence, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and co-applicant of the Globalise -project to disclose the UNESCO archive with more than 25 million pages of historical records by the VOC. He also is co-applicant of A-Proof, where the aim is to evaluate effectiveness and costs of allied healthcare in patients recovering from COVID-19 and projectcoordinator of the robot-project Communicating with and Relating to Social Robots: Alice Meets Leolani’ –  ALANI.

His research interests are WordNets, Computational Lexicon, Ontologies, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology and Computer-Applications, both within a single language and from a multilingual perspective. Vossen is interested in the relation between lexicons and ontologies, from a theoretical point of view as well as from their usage in computer-applications in which meaning and interpretation play a role. He sees the lexicon as a fundamental resource to anchor meaning and interpretation in useful computer behaviour. Computer behaviour can make use of communicative models and insights from communication science. The organization of the lexicon and the knowledge stored in it need to take that usage as a starting point. He combines linguistics and computer science to model understanding of natural language texts by computers.