Alessandro Lenci

Timeline

1. 1991–1999

   Philosophy and linguistics degrees

   He earns a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Pisa in 1991 and a PhD in linguistics at Scuola Normale Superiore in 1999.

2. 1996–1997

   Acting professor in Helsinki

   He serves as acting professor of Italian philology at the University of Helsinki's Department of Romance Languages from 1996 to 1997.

3. 1999–2011

   Research roles at Pisa

   He becomes a research assistant in linguistics at the University of Pisa in 1999, then a researcher in linguistics there in 2002; the researcher post runs through 2011.

4. 2010

   Distributional Memory

   In 2010, he and Marco Baroni publish Distributional Memory: A General Framework for Corpus-Based Semantics in Computational Linguistics.

5. 2011–2020

   Associate professor at Pisa

   He becomes an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Pisa in 2011 and holds the post through 2020.

6. 2020

   ACL Test-of-Time Award

   The Association for Computational Linguistics gives the 2010 Distributional Memory paper its 2020 Test-of-Time Award.

7. 2025

   Academia Europaea election

   The Academy of Europe elects him to its Linguistic Studies section in 2025.

8. As of October 2026

   Pisa professor and CLIMB lead

   In June 2026, he receives an ERC Advanced Grant of about €2.5 million for CLIMB, a project that develops language models using ideas from linguistics, cognitive science and developmental psychology. He is a full professor of linguistics at the University of Pisa, directs its Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, and leads the Computational Linguistics Laboratory. His research spans distributional semantics, language models and cognitive science.