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.