This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Italian Con- ference and for publication in the proceedings, resulting ference on Computational Linguistics. To celebrate this in an acceptance rate of 85.7% (with respect to the rate important achievement for the whole Italian community, of 87.21% for CLiC-it 2023). CLiC-it 2024 is held in Pisa, like for its first edition in Out of the 114 accepted proposals, 32 were included 2014, from 4th to 6th December 2024. in the program as oral presentations (divided into 6 oral Concerning the scientific organization of the confer- sessions) and the remaining 82 were assigned to one of ence, two types of submissions were possible: regular the three poster sessions dedicated to the regular papers. papers, describing substantial, original, completed, and As usual, the criterion for assigning a proposal to an oral unpublished work, and short research communications or a poster session was based on the contents and not on of outstanding papers accepted in both 2023 and 2024 by the quality of the proposal. An additional poster session major publication venues, such as the major international was organized for the 19 research communications that Computational Linguistics conferences (workshops ex- are not published in the proceedings. cluded) or international journals. These latter contribu- An important novelty of this edition is the organization tions are not published in the conference proceedings but of the special event CALAMITA (Challenge the Abilities are aimed to promote the dissemination of high-quality of LAnguage Models in ITAlian) which took place on research within the Italian community. the afternoon of December 6th. The aim of CALAMITA, Like in the previous edition, the conference was not or- that collected 20 tasks, is the collaborative creation of a ganized into separate tracks. Submissions were assigned dynamic benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models to area chairs (thirteen program committee members) supporting the Italian language. according to a set of topics chosen by the authors at sub- In addition to the technical program, this year the mission time. This way we were able to achieve a better conference hosted an interview with Oliviero Stock (Fonbalance of papers for each area chair, while respecting dazione Bruno Kessler, Trento) and Nicoletta Calzolari their research interests. Paper assignment to reviewers (CNR-ILC, Pisa) on the past, present, and future of comwas also managed globally, with a single pool of 140 putational linguistics in Italy, in relation to the wider reviewers, to better monitor the whole process. international landscape. In addition, we were honored to We have received a record number of submissions for have as invited speakers two internationally recognized regular papers: 133 compared to 86 in 2023 (+47). This researchers: result demonstrates the vitality and growth of the Italian Computational Linguistics community. In addition we received 19 submissions for short research communications. During the reviewing process, each regular paper submission was reviewed by three independent reviewers in single-blind fashion. At the end of the process, 114 proposals were accepted for presentation at the con-
• Giosuè Baggio (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim), with a keynote entitled “Meaning and grammar in a parallel architecture for language processing”: This talk introduces a novel cognitive and computational architecture for human language processing. The architecture features parallel streams for meaning and grammar, drawing from a shared mental lexicon and contributing concurrently to incremental updates of a discourse model. Intermediate representations are generated independently within each stream, resulting in a range of possible interactions between meaning and grammar — from dominance and redundancy to competition and conflict. Linguistic phenomena illustrating these diferent interactions and present experimental results corroborating the architecture’s processing consequences are presented. Then a computational model that aligns with experimental results and that demonstrates and Talia4 (Silver), aequa-tech5, Almawave6 and ELRA7 the importance of intermediate representations is (Bronze), Translated8 (Iron), and Meta9 that supported described. Some considerations on how the theory the trip of Dieuwke Hupkes. reconciles two key principles in linguistics — com- Finally, we want to thank very much the Associazione positionality and context — and the traditions that Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale (AILC), all the build on them conclude the talk.. members of the Association Board who supported and • Dieuwke Hupkes (Meta AI Research, Paris, guided us in organizing the conference.
France), with a keynote entitled “Generalisation in LLMs – and beyond”: “Good generalisation” is Pisa, December 2024 often mentioned as a desirable property for NLP models. For LLMs, in the light of the sheer train- Conference Chairs ing corpora, among other things, it becomes more and more challenging to understand if our models • Felice Dell’Orletta, CNR-Institute for Computageneralise, and how important that still is. In this tional Linguistics "A. Zampolli" presentation, I briefly discuss generalisation in NLP • Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa on a higher level, and then move on to discussing it • Simonetta Montemagni, CNR-Institute for specifically for LLMs. What types of generalisation Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" are still important, how would we evaluate it, and is it possible to evaluate it independently from the • Rachele Sprugnoli, University of Parma training corpus? I will – hopefully – answer some of your questions, but also raise a lot more!.
In the first morning of the Conference, Bernardo Magnini and Giovanni Bonetta (FBK, Trento) gave a tutorial entitled "You Are what You Eat: Processing Data for Training and Evaluating LLMs".
This year we received 9 candidate theses for the “Emanuele Pianta Award for the Best Master Thesis”. This special prize for the best Master Thesis (Laurea Magistrale) in Computational Linguistics, submitted at an Italian University, commemorates the late lamented Emmanuele Pianta and is endorsed by AILC. The candidate theses have been evaluated by a jury composed by Gianluca Lebani (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Rachele Sprugnoli (University of Parma) and Sara Tonelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento). The winner was awarded during the closing session of the conference by the members of the jury.
We thank all the people and institutions involved in the organization of the conference, all area chairs, reviewers, and all participants, who contributed to the success of the event. Chairs and reviewers are named in the following pages. We are grateful to the CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" that made CLiC-it 2024 possible by hosting the event and supporting us greatly in the processes of local organization, and to the University of Pisa1 that endorsed our event.
We would like to thank our supporters, who generously provided funds and services that are crucial for the realization of this event: Aptus.AI2, CLARIN-IT3 1https://www.unipi.it/ 2https://www.aptus.ai/ 3https://www.clarin-it.it/ • Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari Aldo Moro • Danilo Croce, University of Rome, Tor Vergata • Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen • Viviana Patti, University of Turin CALAMITA Data and Evaluation Team • Giuseppe Attanasio, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon • Federico Borazio, University of Rome, Tor Vergata • Maria Francis, University of Groningen & University of Trento • Jacopo Gili, University of Turin • Elio Musacchio, University of Bari Aldo Moro • Matteo Rinaldi, University of Turin • Daniel Scalena, University of Groningen & University of Milan Bicocca Local Organization Committee • Chiara Alzetta, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" • Serena Auriemma, University of Pisa 4https://talia.cloud/ 5https://aequa-tech.com/ 6https://www.almawave.com/it/ 7https://www.elra.info/ 8https://translated.com/ 9https://www.meta.com/ Registration System Management
Reviewers