Multilinguality is a key feature of today’s Web, and it is this feature that we leverage and exploit in our research work at the Sapienza University of Rome’s Linguistic Computing Laboratory, which I am going to overview and showcase in this talk.
I will start by presenting BabelNet 2.5 (http://babelnet.org), a very large multilingual encyclopedic dictionary and semantic network, which covers 50 languages and provides both lexicographic and encyclopedic knowledge for all the open-class parts of speech, thanks to the seamless integration of WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, OmegaWiki, Wikidata and the Open Multilingual WordNet.
Next, I will present Babelfy (http://babelfy.org), a unified approach that leverages BabelNet to perform word sense disambiguation and entity linking in arbitrary languages, with performance on both tasks on a par with, or surpassing, those of task-specific state-of-the-art supervised systems.
Roberto Navigli is
an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the
Sapienza University of Rome. He was awarded the Marco Cadoli 2007 AI*IA
Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Artificial Intelligence and the
Marco Somalvico 2013 AI*IA Prize for the best young researcher in AI.
He is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant in computer science and
informatics on multilingual word sense disambiguation (2011-2016) and a co-PI of a Google Focused Research Award on Natural Language Understanding.
His
research lies in the field of Natural Language Processing (including
word sense disambiguation and induction, ontology learning from
scratch, large-scale knowledge acquisition, open information extraction
and relation extraction).
He
has served as an area chair of ACL, WWW, and *SEM, and a senior program
committee member of IJCAI. Currently he is an Associate Editor of the
Artificial Intelligence Journal, a member of the editorial board of the
Journal of Natural Language Engineering, a guest editor of the Journal
of Web Semantics, and a former editorial board member of Computational
Linguistics.