Eneko Agirre

Director, HiTZ Zentroa (UPV/EHU)

Eneko Agirre is a Full Professor at the Computer Science Faculty of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and Director of the HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technology. He has been active in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics since the early stages of his career, and has authored more than 200 publications across areas such as word sense disambiguation, semantic textual similarity, unsupervised machine translation, and the development of language resources, including for minority languages like Basque.

He is internationally recognized for his contributions to NLP and AI. Eneko is a Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics, the first researcher from Spain to receive this distinction, awarded for his work on sense disambiguation, semantic similarity, machine translation, and multilingual resource creation.

He has also received the Spanish National Research Prize in Informatics and has secured multiple research grants for pioneering work in conversational question-answering systems, dialogue learning, and other cutting-edge NLP technologies.

Beyond research, Eneko plays a leading role in academic service: he serves on editorial boards and steering committees of top AI and NLP journals and conferences, contributes to workshops and international courses, and mentors PhD students, several of whom have earned major awards under his supervision.