It is our great pleasure to welcome you to CLiC-it 2019 (clic2019.di.uniba.it/), the Sixth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, held between November 13th and 15th in Bari, hosted and locally organized by Universita degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro.
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 elds 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.
The maturity of the conference is re ected by the quality of the submitted works. We would like to take this opportunity to warmly thank all the authors for submitting their original research. This year CLiC-it received 82 submissions, con rming its increasing trend (from 64 submissions in 2015 to 70 in 2018).
The Program Committee worked very hard to ensure that every paper received at least two careful and fair reviews, with the 69.51% of the papers which received three or even more reviews. This process nally led to the acceptance of 20 papers for oral presentation and 55 papers for poster presentation, with a global acceptance rate of 91.46% motivated by the inclusive spirit of the conference.
That process involved 34 Area Chairs and 209 Program Committee members. They were assisted by 4 additional reviewers. We are extremely grateful to all the PC members and reviewers for producing 238 detailed and insightful reviews.
The conference is also receiving considerable attention from the international community, with 26 (31.71%) submitted papers showing at least one author a liated to a foreign institution, of which 24 accepted (32%). This amounts to a total of 41 authors over 252 (16.33%) a liated to 14 foreign countries: Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and United States.
Regardless of the format of presentation, all accepted papers are included in the proceedings equally and are available as open access publication. In line with previous editions, the conference is organised around thematic areas managed by two chairs per area.
In addition to the technical program, this year we have two invited talks and a tutorial on di erent topics, showing the interdisciplinary spirit of our research community. We are very grateful to both Raquel Fernandez (University of Amsterdam) for agreeing to share with the Italian Computational Linguistics community her knowledge on visually grounded dialogue models, and to Andrea Moro (Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia) for sharing his expertise on the architecture of human grammars, as well as to Dirk Hovy for his tutorial on the problem of bias in Natural Language Processing applications.
As in the previous edition of the conference, we organised a special track called "Research Communications", encouraging authors of articles published in 2019 at outstanding international conferences in our eld to submit short abstracts of their work. Research communications are not published in the proceedings, but they are orally presented within a dedicated session at the conference, in order to enforce dissemination of excellence in research. We received 10 submissions and could include 6 of them in the program.
Finally, the program includes a panel discussion on Ethical issues in Natural Language Processing chaired by Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa). The goal of the panel is to foster a discussion on some key ethical topics in NLP research and applications, with a focus on their impact on the Italian community. Themes of the panel include negative stereotypes in data-driven computational models; sustainability of data- and resource-intense NLP; the impact of NLP technology in digital society; privacy and NLP, among other crucial questions.
Traditionally, around one half of the participants at CLiC-it are young postdocs, PhD students, or even undergraduate students. Following the tradition of past years, a prize will be given to the best paper among those whose rst author is a student. This year, the best paper will be selected among 14 oral papers and 30 papers presented as posters.
Moreover, during the conference we award the prize for the best Master Thesis (Laurea Magistrale) in Computational Linguistics, defended at an Italian University between August 1st 2018 and July 31st 2019. This special prize is also endorsed by AILC. We received 6 candidate theses, which have been evaluated by a special jury. The prize will be awarded at the conference by a member of the jury.
Even if CLiC-it is a medium size conference, organizing this annual meeting requires major e ort from many people. This conference would not have been possible without the dedication, devotion and hard work of the members of the Local Organising Committee and of the Student Volunteers, who o ered their time and energies during the past last year to contribute to the success of the event. We are also extremely grateful to our Program Committee members for producing a lot of detailed and insightful reviews, as well as to the Area Chairs who assisted the Program Chairs in their duties. All these people are named in the following pages.
In addition to the contributions mentioned above, we also gratefully 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 Bari Aldo Moro for its support in the organisation of the event, as well as to our media partner Start Magazine.
Please join us at CLiC-it 2019 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 ndings, best practices, state-of-the-art systems and applications. We hope that, as in the past, 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.
Dialogue, Discourse and Natural Language Generation { Alessandro Mazzei, Universita degli Studi di Torino { Marco Guerini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Explainability of Deep Learning models for NLP { Danilo Croce, Universita degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata { Aurelie Herbelot, Universita degli Studi di Trento Information Extraction, Information Retrieval and Question Answering { Ra aele Perego, ISTI - CNR { Stefano Mizzaro, Universita degli Studi di Udine Knowledge Representation { Enrico Franconi, Libera Universita di Bolzano { Diego Reforgiato, Universita degli Studi di Cagliari Language Resources and Evaluation { Elisabetta Jezek, Universita degli Studi di Pavia { Cristina Bosco, Universita degli Studi di Torino Lexical and Sentence-level Semantics { Alessandro Panunzi, Universita degli Studi di Firenze { Rocco Tripodi, Universita Ca' Foscari di Venezia Linguistic Issues in CL and NLP { Marco Passarotti, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano { Malvina Nissim, Universita di Groningen Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modelling and Psycholinguistics { Marco Marelli, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca { Francesco Vespignani, Universita degli Studi di Trento Machine Translation and Multilinguality { Luisa Bentivogli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler { Johanna Monti, Universita degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale Morphology and Syntax Processing { Fabio Tamburini, FICLIT - Alma mater studiorum Universita di
Bologna { Cristiano Chesi, Ne.T.S.IUSS Center for Neurolinguistics and Theoretical Syntax, Pavia NLP for Digital Humanities { Federico Boschetti, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A.
Zampoli" (ILC), CNR di Pisa { Rachele Sprugnoli, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano NLP for Web and Social Media { Serena Villata, CNRS - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et
Systemes de Sophia-Antipolis { Viviana Patti, Universita degli Studi di Torino Pragmatics and Creativity { Federica Cavicchio, Universita degli Studi di Padova { Carlo Strapparava, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Research and Industrial NLP Applications { Francesca Bonin, IBM Research AI { Alessandro Moschitti, Amazon Replicable and Reproducible methods { Pierpaolo Basile, Universita degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro { Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Universita degli Studi di Padova Spoken Language Processing and Automatic Speech Understanding { Francesco Cutugno, Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II { Alessandro Vietti, Libera Universita di Bolzano Vision, Robotics, Multimodal and Grounding { Tatiana Tommasi, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Milano { Ra aella Folgieri, Universita degli Studi di Milano
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