Eneko Agirre

Eneko Agirre is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, where he serves as the director of the HiTZ Centre on Language Technology. He is an active member of the Ixa Research Group and has established himself as a leading figure in Natural Language Processing, particularly in multilingual and low-resource language settings. His work bridges theoretical advances with practical applications for language technology.

Agirre received his PhD from the University of the Basque Country in 1999 with a thesis on conceptual relationships and ontologies, supervised by Dr. Kepa Sarasola Gabiola and Dr. Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza Sánchez. His academic journey has been marked by significant contributions to computational linguistics and language technology.

His research primarily focuses on Natural Language Processing challenges, with special emphasis on Word Sense Disambiguation, cross-lingual transfer learning, dialogue systems, and Large Language Models for low-resource languages. He has pioneered work on Basque language technology and has consistently addressed the challenges of multilingual AI systems, particularly examining how language models perform across different linguistic contexts and cultural settings.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trajectory toward advancing Large Language Models for low-resource languages, with particular attention to Basque. His work spans vision-language models, information extraction techniques, and rigorous evaluation methodologies for NLP systems. A recurring theme is the exploration of how language models handle low-resource languages compared to high-resource ones, with groundbreaking findings about cultural knowledge transfer between languages.

• Fellow of the ACL (2021), one of only 74 research leaders worldwide
• National Research Prize on Informatics (2021)
• Best resource paper award at ACL 2024
• Honourable mention paper award (top 1%) at EMNLP (2020)
• Outstanding Paper award (top 2%) at COLING (2020)
• Recipient of three Google Faculty Research Awards (2017, 2018, 2019)

Agirre has supervised over 25 PhD students, many of whom have received prestigious awards including the EurAI Artificial Intelligence PhD Dissertation Award. His research has been supported by numerous European projects including LIHLITH (2018-2020) on lifelong learning for dialogue systems, and he has served as principal investigator for multiple CHIST-ERA and FP7 projects. His work with Google includes collaborative projects on entity dictionaries and conversational question answering systems.

As director of the HiTZ Centre on Language Technology and member of the Ixa Research Group, Agirre leads a vibrant team focused on advancing language technology for Basque and other under-resourced languages. The center has developed significant resources including Latxa, an open language model for Basque, and has established itself as a hub for multilingual NLP research. His group actively collaborates with international institutions including Stanford, NYU, and various European universities, fostering a global network for language technology research.