Minerva LLM: what are Large Language Models and why do we need an Italian one?

Name: Minerva LLM: what are Large Language Models and why do we need an Italian one?
Start: 2025-09-20T16:15:00+01:00
Location: Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester City Centre

Schedule

Sat, 20 Sep, 2025 at 04:15 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester City Centre | Manchester, EN

Saturday 20 September 2025 – 4.15pm for 4.30pm start
Cross Street Chapel, Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL
Societa’ Dante Alighieri Manchester in cooperation with the University of Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI invite you to a talk by Roberto Navigli (Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sapienza University of Rome)

Minerva LLM: what are Large Language Models and why do we need an Italian one?
ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming a dominant presence in our lives. After introducing LLMs and highlighting their cultural and professional significance in today’s world, Roberto Navigli will discuss the need for an Italian-focused LLM, focusing on its cultural specificity. He will then present Minerva AI LLM (http://minerva-ai.org/), a family of models trained from scratch in both Italian and English and released as open source by the Sapienza NLP research group within the framework of the PNRR FAIR (Future AI Research) project. Finally, he will explore their potential applications in institutional settings.

Bio: Roberto Navigli is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP group. Author of over 250 publications, he has received two prestigious ERC grants in multilingual semantics, recognized among the ERC's top 15 science-transforming projects. He is the lead of Minerva AI LLM — the first Italian-born, open-source large language model — and Scientific Director and co-founder of Babelscape, a successful deep-tech spin-off in multilingual text understanding and generation. He is a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, ELLIS, and EurAI, and was appointed General Chair of ACL 2025, the world’s leading NLP conference.

The talk (in English) will be followed by a social gathering with a glass of wine and nibbles
Venue: Cross Street Chapel, Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL

Admission: members and our students of Italian FREE / non-members £ 3.00
In order to arrange seating and refreshments, it would be appreciated if you could book in advance by emailing us at [email protected]