Royal Society Milner Award Lecture 2025: Professor Iryna Gurevych

The Milner Award and Lecture 2025 is awarded to Professor Iryna Gurevych for her major contributions to natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence that combine deep understanding of human language and cognitive faculty with the latest paradigms in machine learning.

Professor Iryna Gurevych’s current work is in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). This is the field which has brought about Large Language Models, search engines, machine translation and similar applications. Iryna’s core research has focussed on modelling semantic similarities of words, sentences and documents. This foundational methodology is at the very heart of making computers understand human language. With the rise of deep learning, Iryna has worked on deep learning for NLP with a strong focus on efficiency and modularity. She has contributed to information consolidation, information search and innovative applications of NLP in Social Sciences and Humanities. Iryna was among the pioneers in making computers extract and analyse arguments from unstructured text. She’s recently become interested in AI and NLP for Mental Health and fighting misinformation and of course in Large Language Models and bettering language-based Human-AI cooperation.

Iryna Gurevych (born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine) is a computer scientist and Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt. Gurevych received her diploma in English and German Linguistics from the Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University in 1998. In 2001, she received her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Duisburg-Essen. From 2001 to 2007, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the European Media Lab and EML Research and the Technical University of Darmstadt. As head of an Emmy Noether Research Group funded by the German Research Foundation, Gurevych then founded the "Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing" (UKP) Lab. She was awarded a Lichtenberg Professorship of the Volkswagen Foundation in 2008. In 2009, she was promoted to full professor and headed several multi-institutional research centers. Since 2020, Gurevych has been co-director of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) program of ELLIS, a European Network of Excellence in Machine Learning. In 2020, Gurevych was selected as a Fellow of the international scientific Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her outstanding contributions in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. In 2023, she served as the president of ACL. Gurevych received the first LOEWE top-professorship from the state of Hesse in March 2021, and an ERC Advanced Grant for her project InterText in 2022. She is a member of BBAW and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Attending in person

Doors will open to the public at 6.00pm BST for those with an advance in-person ticket.

Find travel and accessibility information on our website.

Attending live online

The lecture will be livestreamed on the Royal Society YouTube channel, please register for tickets to gain access to this link.

For all enquiries, please contact awards@royalsociety.org.