Roberto Basili

Roberto Basili is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Roma, Tor Vergata, where he has been a member of the Artificial Intelligence group (ART) since 1991. His academic appointments span both the Faculty of Engineering and the Department of Linguistics, reflecting his interdisciplinary approach to natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Professor Basili's research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation, and their applications in Information Retrieval and the Semantic Web. His work particularly emphasizes semantic tagging, word sense disambiguation, ontology engineering, and music genre categorization. He leads the ART (Artificial Agent @ Roma Tor Vergata) research group, which develops frameworks for language-driven ontology learning and question answering systems.

His publication record shows consistent contributions from the early 1990s through 2006, with recent work emphasizing kernel methods for semantic role labeling, ontology-driven information retrieval, and hierarchical semantic analysis. The research trends indicate a progression from foundational work in lexical acquisition and parsing toward more sophisticated semantic analysis and ontology integration, reflecting the evolution of the NLP field itself.

Professor Basili has secured significant research funding through multiple EU Framework Program projects including PrestoSpace (FP6), FF-Poirot (FP5), and MOSES (FP5), as well as NSF grants and Italian national research initiatives (PRIN). These projects demonstrate his ability to lead large-scale collaborative research efforts addressing both theoretical challenges and practical applications in language technology.

His teaching responsibilities include courses on Distributed Databases and Information Retrieval, Database Systems, Fundamentals of Programming in the Faculty of Engineering, and Trattamento Automatico delle Lingue (Natural Language Processing) in the Department of Linguistics. This dual appointment underscores his bridging of computer science and linguistic approaches to language processing.