Roberto Navigli, AI professor at Sapienza University and one of the world's foremost experts in artificial intelligence, will serve as General Chair of ACL 2025. Known as the 'father' of Minerva, Italy's national Large Language Model (LLM), Navigli brings exceptional leadership to what is considered the world's premier conference on Natural Language Processing (NLP) - the branch of AI that has transformed the way people communicate with machines, enabling innovative systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek.
The event, which will take place in Vienna from July 27 to August 1, 2025, is expected to break records: over 5,000 participants onsite and 800 attending remotely, for a total of nearly 6,000 attendees from every corner of the world. In addition to the main conference, there will be 28 workshops and 8 tutorials focused on today's most relevant topics in language processing - from the theory and application of deep learning methods, to LLMs, interactive dialogue systems, and multimodal systems.
On stage, along with a strong presence of researchers and students from the world's top universities, the event will welcome software engineers and entrepreneurs from major Big Tech companies (including Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Alibaba, Baidu, and Bloomberg) as well as fast-growing Italian companies such as Babelscape and Translated.
Two keynote speeches will be delivered by Luke Zettlemoyer, Professor at the University of Washington and Senior Research Director at Meta - the company behind the open-source LLama LLM family - and by Verena Rieser, a pioneer in multimodal dialogue systems and natural language generation, currently Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Her team is a key contributor to the Gemini LLM, with a mission to enhance model safety and usability across diverse communities.
The conference will feature the presentation of more than 3,500 scientific papers, with a focus on the challenges and innovations surrounding LLMs - the beating heart of modern AI. A showcase of excellence for Italy and the international scientific community, led by one of its most brilliant figures.