Leo Wanner earned his Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and his PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of The Saarland, Germany. Prior to joining ICREA he held positions at the German National Centre for Computer Science (GMD), University of Waterloo, University of Stuttgart and Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. As visiting researcher, he was affiliated with U of Montreal, U of Sydney, U of Southern California's Institute for Information Sciences, U Paris 7, Columbia University, and U of Augsburg. Throughout his career, Leo has been involved as Principal Investigator in numerous national and European research projects. He has published 10 volumes and more than 230 peer reviewed papers. He is Associate Editor of the Computational Intelligence and Frontiers in AI, Language and Computation journals and serves as regular reviewer for a number of high profile conferences and journals in the field.

Leo Wanner is working in the field of computational linguistics, teaching the computer to understand spoken and written natural language material, to supply people with information that might be useful to them and to interact with people. His research areas include human-computer interaction (in particular, the design and realization of conversational agents that reveal social and cultural competence), automatic written and spoken language generation, automatic summarization of written material, data-driven parsing, information extraction, and, more recently, abusive language analysis, author profiling and the information structure-prosody interface. He is furthermore interested in lexicology and lexicography, and there, in particular, in the automatic recognition, representation and use of lexical idiosyncrasies (so-called "collocations") by both native speakers and learners of a language. An important characteristics of his research is that it is multilingual.