This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics. To celebrate this important achievement for the whole Italian community, CLiC-it 2024 is held in Pisa, like for its first edition in 2014, from 4th to 6th December 2024.
Concerning the scientific organization of the conference, two types of submissions were possible: regular papers, describing substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work, and short research communications of outstanding papers accepted in both 2023 and 2024 by major publication venues, such as the major international Computational Linguistics conferences (workshops excluded) or international journals. These latter contributions are not published in the conference proceedings but are aimed to promote the dissemination of high-quality research within the Italian community.
Like in the previous edition, the conference was not organized into separate tracks. Submissions were assigned to area chairs (thirteen program committee members) according to a set of topics chosen by the authors at submission time. This way we were able to achieve a better balance of papers for each area chair, while respecting their research interests. Paper assignment to reviewers was also managed globally, with a single pool of 140 reviewers, to better monitor the whole process.
We have received a record number of submissions for regular papers: 133 compared to 86 in 2023 (+47). This 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-
ference and for publication in the proceedings, resulting in an acceptance rate of 85.7% (with respect to the rate of 87.21% for CLiC-it 2023).
Out of the 114 accepted proposals, 32 were included in the program as oral presentations (divided into 6 oral sessions) and the remaining 82 were assigned to one of the three poster sessions dedicated to the regular papers. As usual, the criterion for assigning a proposal to an oral or a poster session was based on the contents and not on the quality of the proposal. An additional poster session was organized for the 19 research communications that are not published in the proceedings.
An important novelty of this edition is the organization of the special event CALAMITA (Challenge the Abilities of LAnguage Models in ITAlian) which took place on the afternoon of December 6th. The aim of CALAMITA, that collected 20 tasks, is the collaborative creation of a dynamic benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models supporting the Italian language.
In addition to the technical program, this year the conference hosted an interview with Oliviero Stock (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento) and Nicoletta Calzolari (CNR-ILC, Pisa) on the past, present, and future of computational linguistics in Italy, in relation to the wider international landscape. In addition, we were honored to have as invited speakers two internationally recognized researchers:
• 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. 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 and Talia4 (Silver), aequa-tech5 , Almawave6 and ELRA7 (Bronze), Translated8 (Iron), and Meta9 that supported the trip of Dieuwke Hupkes.
Finally, we want to thank very much the Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale (AILC), all the members of the Association Board who supported and guided us in organizing the conference.
• Chiara Alzetta, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" • Serena Auriemma, University of Pisa
R. Sprugnoli) https://www.ilc.cnr.it/people/felice-dellorletta-2/ (F. Dell'Orletta); https://people.unipi.it/alessandro_lenci/ (A. Lenci); https://www.ilc.cnr.it/people/simonetta-montemagni-2/ (S. Montemagni); https://personale.unipr.it/it/ugovdocenti/person/236480
• Alessandro Bondielli, University of Pisa • Luca Dini, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" • Chiara Fazzone, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" • Martina Miliani, University of Pisa
• Danilo Croce, University of Rome "Tor Vergata" • Andrea Zaninello, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
• Alessio Miaschi, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli" • Marta Sartor, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli"
• Sofia Brenna, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
• Chiara Alzetta, CNR-Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli"
• Sara Barcena, freelance designer