Recent psycholinguistic and neuroscientific research has emphasized the crucial role of emotions for abstract words, which would be grounded by affective experience, instead of a sensorimotor one. The hypothesis of affective embodiment has been proposed as an alternative to the idea that abstract words are linguistically coded and that linguistic processing plays a key role in their acquisition and processing. In this paper, we use distributional semantic models to explore the complex interplay between linguistic and affective information in the representation of abstract words. Distributional analyses on Italian norming data show that abstract words have more affective content and tend to co-occur with contexts with higher emotive values, according to affective statistical indices estimated in terms of distributional similarity with a restricted number of seed words strongly associated with a set of basic emotions. Therefore, the strong affective content of abstract words might just be an indirect byproduct of co-occurrence statistics. This is consistent with a version of representational pluralism in which concepts that are fully embodied either at the sensorimotor or at the affective level live side-by-side with concepts only indirectly embodied via their linguistic associations with other embodied words.

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This paper studies the relationship between the valence, one of the psycholinguistic variables in the Italian version of ANEW (Montefinese et al., 2014), and emotive scores calculated by exploiting distributional methods (Passaro et al., 2015). We show two methods to infer valence from fine grained emotions and discuss their evaluation.

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.