Roni Katzir
Full professor
Organization
Tel Aviv University
About Roni Katzir
Roni Katzir is a full professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, Israel, where he is head of the Computational Linguistics Lab. He is co-leading the Reintegrating Linguistics project.
Originally from Jerusalem, Katzir grew up in Israel and the UK. He received a BSc in mathematics (summa cum laude) from Tel Aviv University in 2001 and a PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, US) in 2008. He then held a visiting assistant professorship at Cornell University (US) from 2008 to 2010 before joining the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. He was a visiting associate professor at MIT from 2016 to 2018 and was appointed full professor at Tel Aviv University in 2025.
Research Focus
Katzir’s research connects formal linguistics with cognitive science and computation, focusing on how humans represent linguistic structure and how these representations are learned. His work studies the interplay between representational capacity and principles of simplicity in language learning, and the ways in which meaning and use are shaped not only by what is said but also by alternative expressions left unsaid. More recently, Katzir has been investigating how insights from formal linguistics and learnability theory can inform the study of large language models and their relation to human linguistic cognition.
His research has appeared in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Linguistics & Philosophy, Journal of Semantics, Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Language Modelling, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He serves as an associate editor of Linguistics & Philosophy. His work has been supported by multiple competitive research grants, including two individual grants from the Israel Science Foundation, and international collaborative funding such as the MIT-Israel Zuckerman STEM Fund. He collaborates with researchers in France, Germany and the US.
Awards and Recognition
Katzir is the recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Tel Aviv University Innovative Breakthrough Grant / Schmidt Futures award.
Feature image: Portrait courtesy of Roni Katzir.
‘s projects
The Question How can linguistic theory be reconnected with broader fundamental questions about cognition and evolution? Current theories of cross-linguistic patterns in word order assume a very richly structured innate syntactic system with many detailed constraints on how words can be arranged. While this view captures important empirical generalizations, it leaves open two major questions: […]
NOMIS researcher(s)
Project period
2026 – 2029
