This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, CLiC-it! To commemorate this milestone, CLiC-it will be hosted in Pisa, just as it was in 2014, from the 4th to the 6th of December.

Over the years, CLiC-it has evolved into an important forum for the Italian community of researchers in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). CLiC-it aims to promote and disseminate high-quality, original research covering different aspects of automatic language processing, involving both written and spoken language. Furthermore, it seeks to showcase cutting-edge theoretical findings, experimental methodologies, technologies, and application perspectives.

The spirit of the conference is inclusive. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of language phenomena and the need for interdisciplinary expertise, CLiC-it aims to bring together researchers from different fields including Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Knowledge Representation, Information Retrieval, and Digital Humanities. CLiC-it welcomes contributions focusing on all languages, with a particular emphasis on Italian.

Important Dates

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– 15/07/2024: Paper submission deadline: regular papers and research communications

– 23/09/2024: Notification to authors of reviewing/selection outcome

– 21/10/2024: Camera ready version of accepted papers

– 4-6/12/2024: CLiC-it 2024 Conference, Pisa

Conference Chairs

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– Felice Dell’Orletta (CNR-ILC)

– Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa)

– Simonetta Montemagni (CNR-ILC)

– Rachele Sprugnoli (Università di Parma)

Further information

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Conference website: https://clic2024.ilc.cnr.it/ 

Mail: clicit2024@gmail.com 

The newspaper “Il Manifesto” published an article (in Italian) on the CLiC-it 2023 conference: A Venezia tra le radici e il futuro dell’Intelligenza artificiale (translation: In Venice between the roots and the future of artificial intelligence).

The invited speakers of CLiC-it 2023 are David Bamman (UC Berkeley) with a talk entitled “The Promise and Peril of Large Language Models for Cultural Analytics” and Vera Demberg (Saarland University) who will talk about “Pragmatic processing in humans and language models”.
The program comprises 30 oral presentations (including 4 Research Communications), 65 posters (including 16 Research Communications) and the tutorial “Large Language Models and How to Instruction Tune Them (in a Sustainable Way)” held by Danilo Croce and Claudiu Hromei .

We are glad to announce that Debora Nozza has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her project PERSONAE: congratulations!

PERSONAE will investigate subjective tasks from the individual’s point of view, designing language technologies that can be adapted by individuals at will over time. It will focus on making individual users active actors in the creation of these technologies rather than mere recipients. This will enable a much more tailored, effective approach to NLP model design, resulting in better models that are also accessible and valuable to everyone.

From 29 to 31 May the 2023 edition of the Lectures on Computational Linguistics was held at the University of Pisa, organized by Alessandro Lenci (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, University of Pisa) and Felice Dell’Orletta (ILC-CNR). The 2023 edition recorded a record number of participants, with 200 master’s, doctoral and post-doc students enrolled, coming from Italy and abroad. The Lectures were held in coordination with the parallel event Ital-IA, the conference on artificial intelligence organized by the National Interuniversity Consortium for Computer Science (CINI).

The 2023 Lectures were made up of four tutorials by international teachers (Afra Alishahi, Albert Gatt, Barbara Plack, Ellie Pavlick), two workshops (Alessandro Bondielli, Alessio Miaschi, Lucia Passaro, Gabriele Sarti) and two evening seminars which illustrated the main challenges of the field, held by Dino Pedreschi and Simonetta Montemagni.

The Lectures focused on the most recent learning and knowledge representation models in mono- and multi-modal contexts, with particular reference to the latest generation of neural language models. Aspects related to the processes of generation and transfer of knowledge, their interpretation and explainability were addressed. The topics have been declined both in a theoretical perspective of linguistic and IT study and in application scenarios oriented to Digital Humanities.