AI Takes the Floor: CiTIUS Establishes Itself as a Leader in Language Technologies

The CiTIUS faces the final weeks of 2025, intensifying its scientific activity in the field of technologies associated with language processing, an area of exceptional importance in artificial intelligence. The center, together with the Instituto da Lingua Galega (ILG), is developing the Nós project, a joint initiative of the Xunta de Galicia and the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), to provide Galician with the technological resources necessary to be on par with technologically more developed languages in the digital economy and society.

Senén Barro, the scientific director of CiTIUS and principal investigator of the state-funded projects Nós-ILENIA and Nós-ALIA, for the development of language technologies in Spain's languages, believes that "Galicia not only has the unavoidable responsibility to also promote its language in the society of machines, but it is also in a magnificent position to socially and economically profit from its scientific and technological competence in the field of language technologies."

In this context, Barro (professor of Artificial Intelligence), recently delivered a lecture at the ILG 2025 Symposium "Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies", held from November 18 to 20 at the Facultade de Filoloxía of the University of Santiago de Compostela. Throughout his talk, titled "AI Takes the Floor", Barro analyzed the growing role of artificial intelligence in constructing advanced linguistic models and resources, as well as the challenges these technologies pose for "the future of the Galician language in the digital era."

At the same time, CiTIUS (a center co-financed by the European Union through the Galicia Feder Program 2021–2027) was also present at two activities held in Alicante in the previous days. The first was the Language Technologies Days, organized at the CENID, a research center at the University of Alicante that collaborates on the ILENIA and ALIA projects. At this meeting, Senén Barro gave the lecture "The AI of the Future: Who Knows!", in which Alfonso Ureña, professor of Languages and Computer Systems at the University of Jaén, also participated, analyzing with Barro the role of language and structured data as a basis to move from experimentation to real applications of generative artificial intelligence.

The second activity took place in the afternoon at the INFORMACIÓN Club in Alicante: the II ALIA Forum: Business Intelligence. Generative AI at the service of the company, a meeting organized by the newspaper INFORMACIÓN in collaboration with CENID. The forum, aimed at showing how generative AI can be put at the service of companies, brought together professionals and representatives from the sector in a program that included a welcome from Toni Cabot, the director of the newspaper, and an initial presentation by Beatriz Botella, senior researcher at CENID. The event again featured the participation of Alfonso Ureña, who gave one of the two main presentations together with Senén Barro, addressing the potential of generative AI from the perspective of natural language processing. The day concluded with a joint interview conducted by Toni Cabot and a dialogue space with the audience.