We are glad to introduce CLiC-it 2014 (http://clic.humnet.unipi.it), the first edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, a new event aiming to establish a reference forum for research on Computational Linguistics of the Italian community. CLiC-it covers all aspects of automatic language understanding, both written and spoken, and targets state-of-art theoretical results, experimental methodologies, technologies, as well as application perspectives, which may contribute to advance the field.CLiC-it 2014 is held in Pisa on December 9-10 2014, and it is co-located with EVALITA-2014 (http://www.evalita.it), the fourth edition of the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech tools for Italian and with the XIII Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (Pisa, 10-12 December 2014, http://aiia2014.di.unipi.it/).Pisa is a special place in the history of Italian Computational Linguistics. Here, Padre Roberto Busa carried out his pioneering research on automatic text processing in the late '60s with Antonio Zampolli, who then founded the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR in Pisa, the first research center thoroughly devoted to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The University of Pisa also hosted the first professorship in Computational Linguistics held by Antonio Zampolli until his death in 2003.It is therefore highly symbolic that the Italian community on Computational Linguistics gathers for the first time in Pisa, there where its roots lie. Italian Computational Linguistics has come a long way. Research groups and centers are now spread nationwide and play an active role on the international scene. The large number of researchers that have decided to present their work to CLiC-it is the best proof of the maturity of our community, strongly committed to shape the future of Computational Linguistics.The spirit of CLiC-it 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