Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it).This volume includes the reports of both task organisers and participants to all of the EVALITA 2020 challenges. In the 2020 edition, we coordinated the organization of 14 different tasks belonging to five research areas, being: (i) Affect, Hate, and Stance, (ii) Creativity and Style, (iii) New Challenges in Long-standing Tasks, (iv) Semantics and Multimodality, Time and Diachrony.The volume is opened by an overview to the EVALITA 2020 campaign, in which we describe the tasks, provide statistics on the participants and task organizers as well as our supporting sponsors. The abstract of the keynote speech made by Preslav Nakov titled "Flattening the Curve of the COVID-19 Infodemic: These Evaluation Campaigns Can Help!" is also included in this collection.Due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the traditional workshop was held online, where several members of the Italian NLP Community presented the results of their research. Despite the circumstances, the workshop represented an occasion for all participants from both academic institutions and private companies to disseminate their work and results and to share ideas through online sessions dedicated to each task and a general discussion during the plenary event.We carried on with the tradition of the "Best system across tasks" award. As in 2018, it represented an incentive for students, IT developers and researchers to push the boundaries of the state of the art by facing tasks in new ways, even if not winning.

This article describes an ongoing project for the development of a novel Italian treebank in Universal Dependencies format: VALICO-UD. It consists of texts written by Italian L2 learners of different mother tongues (German, French, Spanish and English) drawn from VALICO, an Italian learner corpus elicited by comic strips. Aiming at building a parallel treebank currently missing for Italian L2, comparable with those exploited in Natural Language Processing tasks, we associated each learner sentence with a target hypothesis (i.e. a corrected version of the learner sentence written by an Italian native speaker), which is in turn annotated in Universal Dependencies. The treebank VALICO-UD is composed of 237 texts written by non-native speakers of Italian (2,234 sentences) and the related target hypotheses, all automatically annotated using UDPipe. A portion of this resource (36 texts corresponding to 398 learner sentences and related target hypotheses)-firstly released on May 2021 in the Universal Dependencies repository-is associated with error annotation and the automatic output is fully manually checked. In this article, we focus especially on the challenges addressed in treebanking a resource composed of learner texts. In addition, we report on a preliminary data exploration that makes use of three quantitative measures for assessing the quality of the data and for better understanding the role that this resource can play in tasks lying at the intersection of Computational Linguistics and learner corpus studies.

No abstract

No abstract