Roberto Navigli, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sapienza University and creator of the national Large Language Model (LLM) Minerva, has been entrusted with the presidency of the 2025 world meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, scheduled to take place in Vienna from July 27 to August 1.
“Having one of our professors at the helm of such an important conference recognises Sapienza's long tradition in the field of artificial intelligence,” says Rector Antonella Polimeni. This commitment to innovation and progress is further demonstrated by the release of the Minerva language model and the establishment of a specific degree programme, one of the first of its kind in Italy.’

In particular, the meeting is about Natural Language Processing (NLP), the branch of Artificial Intelligence dedicated to teaching computers to understand, interpret and generate human language, which in recent years has produced systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek.

"During the conference, which will bring together nearly 6,000 participants from around the world, more than 3,500 scientific articles will be presented, focusing on the challenges and innovations related to Large Language Models, the latest frontier in the field of Artificial Intelligence: certainly an international showcase of excellence for our research activity," says Roberto Navigli. "In addition to researchers and students from the world's most renowned universities, engineers and entrepreneurs from major Big Tech companies will also take the stage." Roberto Navigli leads the Sapienza NLP research group, which in 2024 released the Minerva family of models, the first trained from scratch for the Italian language through the use of open sources with a total of approximately 2,000 billion words, equivalent to over 20 million novels. With a wide range of models of various sizes and computational capacities, the Minerva project aims to provide a transparent foundation for artificial intelligence systems applicable in various fields, from natural language understanding to text generation and machine translation, constituting a valuable resource for researchers, public administrations, companies and developers.