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CLiC-it 2023 - Ninth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics
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30 November - 2 December 2023, Venice, Italy

Conference Announcement and First Call for Papers

https://clic2023.ilc.cnr.it/
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The Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, CLiC-it, aims at establishing a reference forum for the Italian community of researchers working in the fields of Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). CLiC-it promotes and disseminates high-level, original research on all aspects of automatic language processing, both written and spoken and targets state-of-the-art theoretical results, experimental methodologies, technologies, as well as application perspectives, which may contribute to the advancement of the CL and NLP fields.

The spirit of the conference is inclusive. In the conviction that the complexity of language phenomena needs cross-disciplinary competences, CLiC-it intends to bring together researchers of related disciplines such as Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Knowledge Representation, Information Retrieval, and Digital Humanities. CLiC-it is open to contributions on all languages, with a particular emphasis on Italian.

The ninth edition of CLiC-it will be held in Venice, on 30 November - 2 December, 2023. CLiC-it is organised by the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics (AILC -- www.ai-lc.it).


Submission Format
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CLiC-it 2023 invites the submission of long and short papers in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.

CLiC-it 2023 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to (in alphabetical order):

- Computational Historical Linguistics
- Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
- Dialogue and Interactive Systems
- Discourse and Pragmatics
- Ethics and NLP
- Generation
- Handwritten Text Recognition
- Information Extraction
- Information Retrieval and Text Mining
- Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

- Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
- Large Language Models
- Linguistic Diversity
- Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics
- Machine Learning for NLP
- Machine Translation
- Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP
- NLP Applications
- NLP for the Humanities
- Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation
- Pragmatics and Creativity
- Question Answering
- Resources and Evaluation
- Semantics: Lexical, Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, and Other Areas
- Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
- Speech and Multimodality
- Summarization
- Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

Paper Types and Formats
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- LONG PAPERS must describe substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers may consist of up to six (6) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references and appendices. Final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to seven (7) pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

- SHORT PAPERS submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, short papers should have a small, focused contribution - a point that can be made in a few pages with sufficient level of detail. Short papers may consist of up to three (3) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references and appendices. Final versions of short papers will be given one additional page of content (up to four (4) pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.

In particular, CLiC-it 2023 welcomes the following kinds of contributions:

- Computationally-aided linguistic and literary analysis (of either models or data resources)
- NLP engineering experiment
- Reproduction study
- New data resources, particularly for Italian and for low-resource languages
- Approaches for data- and compute efficiency
- Position papers
- Surveys
- Publicly available software and pre-trained models

Both, long and short papers, will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
- soundness of approach
- relevance to computational linguistics
- novelty and clarity of relation with related work
- quality of presentation
- quality of evaluation (only for long papers, if applicable)
- verifiability and ability to replicate (only for long papers, if applicable)

While there is no direct mapping between types of contributions and paper length, some kinds of papers naturally gravitate towards a certain length: e.g. surveys are more likely to be long rather than short papers. One paper can make more than one contribution of different types (e.g., a paper presenting a new resource and experiments using the resource).

Papers can be either in English or Italian, with the abstract both in English and Italian.

Submission is electronic, using the EasyChair conference management system. Both long and short papers must follow the CLiC-it two-column format, using the supplied official style files. We strongly recommend the use of LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style files according to the following formats:

- Download LaTex Template: https://clic2023.ilc.cnr.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/clic2023.zip

- Download Word Template: https://clic2023.ilc.cnr.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/clic2023.odt

Please do not modify these style files, nor should you use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.

Papers must be submitted through the EasyChair platform using the following link: https://openreview.net/group?id=AI-LC.it/CLiC-it/2023/Conference

Reviewing will NOT be blind, so there is no need to remove author information from manuscripts.


Research Communication Papers
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CLiC-it 2023 favours a parallel submission policy for outstanding papers that have been submitted and accepted elsewhere in 2022. If you are the author of a paper accepted at a major international CL conference or journal in 2022, you can submit your work at CLiC-it 2023 in the form of a short research communication, within a dedicated session at the conference. Research communications will not be published in the proceedings, but are mostly intended to enforce dissemination of excellence in research within the Italian CL community. The papers submitted must be in scope for the CLiC-it 2023 conference.

The authors of any paper that meets the above criteria are invited to submit a written (maximum) one-page document with the abstract of the original paper, the paper’s title, the paper’s authors, and a pointer to the original journal paper at the conference or journal Web site.

Authors will be invited to present their papers at CLiC-it 2023 after a check that the paper satisfies the above listed criteria. As the papers have already been reviewed and published, they will not be reviewed again. In the case that an exceptionally high number of submissions is received, a selection will be made, also based on the original publication venue. Priority will be given to papers that better fit the conference program, offering a balance across the conference topics.

Awards
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In order to award the work of young researchers, the title of “best paper” will be attributed to the best papers in different research areas with a Master/PhD student among the authors and presenting the work at the conference. The awarded authors will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers to the Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCoL).

To recognise excellence in student research as well as promote awareness of our field and with the endorsement of AILC, we are conferring the “Emanuele Pianta” prize for the best Master Thesis (Laurea Magistrale) in Computational Linguistics submitted at an Italian University. The prize consists of 500 euro plus free membership to AILC for one year and free registration to the upcoming CLiC-it, where the author will have the chance to present her/his thesis. The complete call is available on the conference website at: “Calls ) AILC Master Thesis Award”.

Multiple Submission Policy
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CLiC-it 2023 allows for a multiple submission policy. In case of acceptance of the paper in other venues, the authors must communicate this information to the CLiC-it 2023 Chairs as soon as possible.

Important Dates
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- 20/07/2023: Paper submission deadline: long, short, research communications
- 29/09/2023: Notification to authors of reviewing outcome
- 20/10/2023: Camera ready version of accepted papers
- 30/11 - 2/12/2023: CLiC-it Conference, Venice

People
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Conference Chairs:

- Federico Boschetti (Institute for Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli", CNR / Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
- Gianluca Lebani (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
- Bernardo Magnini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
- Nicole Novielli (University of Bari "Aldo Moro")


Local Organizing Committee:

- Franz Fischer (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
- Francesca Dall’Igna (IUSS, School for Advanced Studies Pavia)
- Luca Molinari (Ca' Foscari University of Venice / University of Warsaw)
- Cristina Procentese (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)

Proceedings Chairs:

- Alice Suozzi (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
- Andrea Zaninello (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)

Webmasters:

- Eleonora Ghizzota (University of Bari "Aldo Moro")
- Tiziano Labruna (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)

Publicity Chair

- Sofia Brenna (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)

Further information
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Conference website: https://clic2023.ilc.cnr.it/
Mail: clicit2023@gmail.com