1EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for the Italian language: since 2007 shared tasks have been proposed covering the analysis of both written and spoken language with the aim of enhancing the development and dissemination of resources and technologies for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it/) and it is supported by the NLP Special Interest Group of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA, http://www.aixia.it/) and by the Italian Association of Speech Science (AISV, http://www.aisv.it/).

2In this volume, we collect the reports of the tasks’ organisers and of the participants to all of the EVALITA 2016’s tasks, which are the following: ArtiPhone - Articulatory Phone Recognition; FactA - Event Factuality Annotation; NEEL-IT - Named Entity rEcognition and Linking in Italian Tweets; PoSTWITA - POS tagging for Italian Social Media Texts; QA4FAQ - Question Answering for Frequently Asked Questions; SENTIPOLC - SENTIment POLarity Classification. Notice that the volume does not include reports related to the IBM Watson Services Challenge organised by IBM Italy, but information can be found at http://www.evalita.it/2016/tasks/ibm-challenge. Before the task and participant reports, we also include an overview to the campaign that describes the tasks in more detail, provides figures on the participants, and, especially, highlights the innovations introduced at this year’s edition. An additional report presents a reflection on the outcome of two questionnaires filled by past participants and organisers of EVALITA, and of the panel “Raising Interest and Collecting Suggestions on the EVALITA Evaluation Campaign” held at CLIC-it 2015. The abstract of Walter Daelemans’s invited talk is also included in this volume.

3The final workshop was held in Naples on the 7th of December 2016 as a co-located event of the Third Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2016, http://clic-it2016.dieti.unina.it/). During the workshop, organisers and participants, affiliated both to academic institutions and industrial companies, disseminated the results of the evaluation and the details of the developed systems through oral and poster presentations. We thank all the people and institutions involved in the organisation of the tasks, and all participating teams, who contributed to the success of the event. A special thank is also due to AILC, which is for the first time the official mother of EVALITA. We are especially grateful to AILC not only for its support during the whole of the campaign’s organisation, but also for having financially contributed to data creation for the SENTIPOLC task, by funding the crowdsourcing experiment. Thanks are also due to AI*IA and AISV for endorsing EVALITA, and to FBK for making the web platform available once more for this edition (http://www.evalita.it). Last but not least, we heartily thank our invited speaker, Walter Daelemans from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, for agreeing to share his expertise on key topics of EVALITA 2016.

November 2016

EVALITA 2016 Co-Chairs

Chairs

Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari, Italy

Franco Cutugno, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy

Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Viviana Patti, University of Turin, Italy

Rachele Sprugnoli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and University of Trento, Italy

Steering Committee

Leonardo Badino, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy

Francesco Barbieri, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Pierpaolo Basile, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy

Valerio Basile, Universit´e Cˆote d’Azur, Inria, CNRS, France

Andrea Bolioli, CELI s.r.l - Language Technology, Italy

Cristina Bosco, University of Turin, Italy

Annalina Caputo, ADAPT Centre Dublin, Ireland

Tommaso Caselli, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Danilo Croce, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy

Franco Cutugno, University of Naples “Federico II”, italy

Marco De Gemmis, University of Bari, Italy

Anna Lisa Gentile, University of Mannheim, Germany

Bertrand Higy, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy

Pietro Leo, IBM GBS BAO Advanced Analytics Services and MBLab, Italy

Pasquale Lops, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy

Francesco Lovecchio, AQP s.p.a., Italy

Vito Manzari, SudSistemi s.r.l., Italy

Alessandro Mazzei, University of Turin, Italy

Anne-Lyse Minard, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Nicole Novielli, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy

Viviana Patti, University of Turin, Italy

Giuseppe Rizzo, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy

Manuela Speranza, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

Rachele Sprugnoli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and University of Trento, Italy

Fabio Tamburini, University of Bologna, Italy