Proceedings of the 7th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, CLiC-it 2020

Preface 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 ofthe 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. Traditionally, around one half of the participants at CLiC-it are young postdocs, PhD students, and even undergraduate students. As in the previous edition of the conference, we organised a special track called “Research Communications”, encouraging authors of articles published in 2020 at outstanding international conferences in our field to submit short abstracts of their work. Research communications are not published in the proceedings, but will be orally presented within a dedicated session at the conference, in order to enforce dissemination of excellence in research. Moreover, during the conference we will award the prize for the best Master Thesis (Laurea Magistrale) in Computational Linguistics, submitted at an Italian University between August 1st 2019 and July 31st 2020. This special prize is also endorsed by AILC. We have received 4 candidate theses, which have been evaluated by a special jury. The prize will be awarded at the conference, by a member of the jury. i As last year, we propose a tutorial at the beginning of the conference by Alessandro Lenci. We highlight the importance that this kind of opportunities have for young researchers in particular, and we are proud of having made the tutorial attendance free for all registered students. Even if CLiC-it is a medium size conference, organizing this annual meeting requires major effort from many people. This conference will not be possible without the dedication, devotion and hard work of the members of the Local Organising Committee, who volunteered their time and energies to contribute to the success of the event. We are also extremely grateful to our Programme Committee members for producing a lot of detailed and insightful reviews, as well as to the Area Chairs who assisted the Programme Chairs in their duties. All these people are named in the following pages. We also want to acknowledge the support from endorsing organisations and institutions and from all of our sponsors, who generously provided funds and services that are crucial for the realisation of this event. Special thanks are also due to the University of Bologna for its support in the organisation of the event. Please join us at CLiC-it 2020 to interact with experts from academia and industry on topics related to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing and to experience and share new research findings, best practices, state-of-the-art systems and applications. We hope that this year’s conference will be intellectually stimulating, and that you will take home many new ideas and methods that will help extend your own research.