CLiC-it 2020 - Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics 2020 - Proceedings of the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Seventh Italian Conference on
Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2020). This edition of the conference is held in Bologna and
organised by the University of Bologna. The CLiC-it conference series is an initiative of the Italian
Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after six years of activity, has clearly
established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of
Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and
practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and
challenges.
This year CLiC-it received 80 submissions against 64 submissions in 2015, 69 in 2016, 72 in
2017, 70 in 2018 and 82 in 2019 confirming the increasing trend of the past years. The
Programme Committee worked very hard to ensure that every paper received at least three
careful and fair reviews. This process finally led to the acceptance of 19 papers for oral
presentation and 53 papers for poster presentation, with a global acceptance rate of 90%
motivated by the inclusive spirit of the conference. The conference is also receiving considerable
attention from the international community, with 17 (21%) submissions showing at least one
author affiliated to a foreign institution. Regardless of the format of presentation, all accepted
papers are allocated 5 or 6 pages plus 2 pages for references in the proceedings, available as
open access publication. In line with previous editions, the conference is organised around
thematic areas managed by one or two area chairs per area.
In addition to the technical programme, this year we are honoured to have as invited speakers
internationally recognised researchers as Veronique Hoste (Ghent University) and Stefan Kopp
(Bielefeld University). We are very grateful to Veronique and Stefan for agreeing to share with
the Italian community their knowledge and expertise on key topics in Computational Linguistics.