I am a Full Professor at the Computer Science Faculty of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. I am the director of the recently created HiTZ Centre on Language Technology, where I am part of the Ixa Research Group. I was the founder and first director of the HiTZ Chair on Artificial Intelligence and Language Technology, part of the Spanish “Estrategia Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial”. I am Fellow of the ACL, a selective worldwide group of 87 research leaders, and awardee of the National Research Prize on Informatics (video and speech). I am a full member of Jakiunde, Academy of Sciences, Arts and Humanities of the Basque Country. One of my students won the EurAI Artificial Intelligence PhD Dissertation Award.
My schedule in case you need an appointment.
Recent talks, projects, courses
- Invited talks on “LLMs and low-resource languages” at Pint of Science, APPLAI, Swisstext, EVIA, RANLP 2025
- Invited talks on “LLMs and low-resource languages” at ILLC institute announcement (University of Edinburgh), LTL lab announcement (University of Cambridge), HCAI Network (University of Aberdeen), NPLD-Coppieters Campus (Barcelona), Tecnalia (Zamudio) and Lehendakaritza (Basque Government, Gasteiz) 2024
- Co-organizer of data-contamination workshop @ ACL 2024
- Invited talk on C-SEPLN webinar series “How many languages will the AI talk when it destroys humanity?” (in Spanish)
- Previous versions on Sistedes webinar 2024 series (in Spanish), and on a more divulgative note (in Basque) on UEU 2023 course opening, Science Faculty and Zientziaren Giltzak Elkartea
- Panelist in EMNLP 2023 Workshop Panel (Singapore): “Pattern-based Approaches to NLP in the Age of Deep Learning”
- Invited crash course on NLP at University of Surrey, Oct. 2023
- Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing course at DeepLearn July 2023 and DeepLearn April 2022
- Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing course (twice a year, Winter and Summer)
- Keynote talks on “Few-shot Information Extraction is Here: Pre-train, Prompt and Entail” at several venues in 2022:
- In chronological order: NLDB, SIGIR, TSD, IWSKR workshop of the AKBC and Northeastern University
- Most Recent Slides and video (those at SIGIR: slides and video)
- Papers and code
- Co-organizer of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO) workshop at ACL 2022, a workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures (also in 2020, 2021)
Recent awards
- Best Spanish PhD on Artificial Intelligence by Oscar Sainz, 2025
- I am deeply honored to have been elected full member of Jakiunde, Academy of Sciences, Arts and Humanities of the Basque Country
- Best resource paper award @ ACL 2024
- Fellow of the ACL, a selective worldwide group of 74 research leaders, 2021
- Awardee of the National Research Prize on Informatics (video and speech), 2021
- Best European AI PhD dissertation (awarded by EurAI) to PhD student Mikel Artetxe in 2021, who also won best NLP PhD in Spain (SEPLN), and is a National Youth Research Prize on Informatics awardee.
- LIHLITH project on Lifelong Learning for Dialogue selected as success story at CHIST-ERA meeting (project website), 2021
- Honourable mention paper award (top 1%) at EMNLP (details), 2020
- Outstanding Paper award (top 2%) at COLING (details), 2020
- Won a prize in White House promoted challenge related to COVID-19 (details) 2020
- Recipient of a 2019 Google Faculty Research Award for research on conversational QA (also in 2017 and 2018)
- Part of the team who won the 2020 OpenCLIR Text Track Challenge (organised by NIST and IARPA)
Professional service
- Member of the Coling Best Paper Award commitee (2025)
- Member of the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award commitee (2024)
- Area committee member for CORE Conference Rankings (2023)
- Member of the ELLIS Society, European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (2020-)
- Associate Editor for the JAIR journal (2021-2024)
- SemEval 2021 and 2020 steering committee
- Action Editor for TACL (2018-2021)
- Member of government evaluation body (ANEP area TIC), 2020
- Co-founder of the *SEM conference series, now in it’s 10th edition
- Usual senior area chair, area chair and reviewer at ACL conferences, EMNLP, COLING, CoNLL, IJCAI, AAAI, Neurips and ICLR
The book on WSD:
- Word Sense Disambiguation: Algorithms and applications (Springer. Agirre, Eneko; Edmonds, Philip (Eds.) 2006 and 2007.
A cartoon in Basque about the ambiguity of baso (forest or glass). 
Credit: Olariaga, berria.eus
Official research page at university, which misses many papers.