Disentangling the Thoughts: Latest News in Computational Argumentation

Abstract

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall "Cavallerizza Reale". The CLiC-it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five 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 70 submissions against 64 submissions in 2015, 69 in 2016 and 72 in 2017. The Programme Committee worked very hard to ensure that every paper received at least two careful and fair reviews. This process finally led to the acceptance of 18 papers for oral presentation and 45 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 16 (23%) submissions showing at least one author affiliated to a foreign institution. Regardless of the format of presentation, all accepted papers are allocated 5 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 Johan Bos (University of Groningen) and Iryna Gurevych (Technische Universität Darmstadt). We are very grateful to Johan and Iryna for agreeing to share with the Italian community their knowledge and expertise on key topics in Computational Linguistics.Traditionally, around one half of the participants at CLiC-it are young postdocs, PhD students, and even undergraduate students. As in the previous edition of the conference, we organised a special track called "Research Communications", encouraging authors of articles published in 2018 at outstanding international conferences in our field to submit short abstracts of their work. Research communications are not published in the proceedings, but are orally presented within a dedicated session at the conference, in order to enforce dissemination of excellence in research.Moreover, during the conference we award the prize for the best Master Thesis (Laurea Magistrale) in Computational Linguistics, submitted at an Italian University between August 1st 2017 and July 31st 2018. This special prize is also endorsed by AILC. We have 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.