Abstract:
In this talk I will present work done in my group at the Computer Science Department of the Sapienza University of Rome which addresses key problems in multilingual lexical semantics. Starting from a brief introduction to BabelNet (http://babelnet.org), the largest multilingual semantic network and encyclopedic dictionary covering 14 million concepts and entities, and 271 languages, I will move on to Word Sense Disambiguation and Entity Linking in arbitrary languages with "zero training" (Babelfy, http://babelfy.org) and latent (SensEmbed) and explicit (NASARI) vector representations of meaning (the latter of which based on neural networks embeddings of meanings) which obtain state-of-the-art results in several NLP tasks.
This is joint work with several people from my NLP group at Sapienza
(http://lcl.uniroma1.it).

Bio:
Roberto Navigli is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the Sapienza University of Rome. He was awarded the Marco Somalvico 2013 AI*IA Prize for the best young researcher in AI. He is the first Italian recipient of an ERC Starting Grant in computer science on multilingual word sense disambiguation (2011-2016), and a co-PI of a Google Focused Research Award on Natural Language Understanding. In 2015 he received the META prize for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers with BabelNet. His research lies in the field of Natural Language Processing (including multilingual word sense disambiguation and induction, multilingual entity linking, large-scale knowledge acquisition, ontology learning from scratch, gamification for NLP, open information extraction and relation extraction). Currently he is an Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal.