James Pustejovsky is a Professor of Computer Science and has been a leading figure in computational linguistics and lexical semantics for over three decades. He is the original developer of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1995) MIT Press, a framework that models the dynamic and compositional nature of word meaning. His research focuses on theories of distributed meaning, event semantics, multimodal semantics, and their application to NLP, natural language inference and multimodal understanding. He is co-author of the CUP textbook Lexicon (Pustejovsky and Batiukova, 2019), and co-author of the upcoming OUP book Generative Lexicon Theory: A Modern Introduction, with co-presenter Elisabetta Jezek (Pustejovsky and Jezek, 2026).
Elisabetta Jezek is a Professor of Linguistics whose research bridges theoretical linguistics and computational applications. Her work focuses on lexical semantics, argument structure, verb classification, and the syntax-semantics interface, with a particular emphasis on Italian and English. She has collaborated extensively on the development of Generative Lexicon Theory. Her expertise lies in using corpus-based methods to inform theoretical models of polysemy and co-compositionality. She is the author of The Lexicon: An Introduction (Jezek, 2016), OUP and Linguistica computazionale (Jezek and Sprugnoli, 2023), Il Mulino. She is co-author of the upcoming OUP book Generative Lexicon Theory: A Modern Introduction, with co-presenter James Pustejovsky (Pustejovsky and Jezek, 2026).