He was born in 1950 in Poznań and was the only son of Polish zoologist Tadeusz Vetulani and medical doctor and stomatologist Maria née Godlewska. He attended the prestigious Karol Marcinkowski High School, where he passed matura in 1968. In 1973 he graduated in mathematics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He received his PhD in 1977 at the University of Warsaw. In 1982 he obtained his second master's degree graduating in Roman philology from Adam Mickiewicz University. He was a scholarship holder of the French Government at the Université d'Aix-Marseille II and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Bielefeld University and the University of Paris VII. In 1990 he received a habilitation degree at the Faculty of Modern Languages at the Adam Mickiewicz University in the field of humanities. Since 1993, he has been Head of the Department of Information Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Adam Mickiewicz University. On May 30, 2006 he received the title of professor of technical sciences in the field of computer science. Vetulani has published more than 100 research papers and six books which cover subjects such as computational linguistics, language engineering, artificial intelligence and mathematical logic. He created linguistic resources of databases for Polish language and IT systems with language competence. He is an organizer and chair of the program committee of the Language and Technology Conference held every two years in Poznań since 2005. In 1990 he was awarded the Minister of National Education Award, and in 2001 he was awarded the Adam Mickiewicz University Rector Prize.
Hobby activities and personal life
In his free time he is an amateur fencer and a sports activist. He is a member of the training staff and deputy head of the fencing section of KS Warta Poznań club. He co-organized numerous fencing events, among others European Fencing Festival. In 2009 he was the initiator and the creator of the fencing section of KU AZS UAM. In 2014 and 2015, as a representative of Poland, he performed at the European Veterans Championship in fencing. Also in 2015 he won a bronze medal at the European Fencing Veterans' Games held in Nice. He is interested in the history of his family. He arranged and donated to the Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań a large part of his father's legacy. He published a chapter about the Vetulani family in the book Sanok – nasza tożsamość. He is married to Grażyna Vetulani, Roman philologist and professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University. They have two daughters: Agnieszka, a political and jurisprudence scientist, and Maria, a fencer.
Selected books
1990: Corpus of consultative dialogues: experimentally collected source data for AI applications ;
1996: Język i technologia ;
2004: Komunikacja człowieka z maszyną: komputerowe modelowanie kompetencji językowej.