EVALITA 2016: Overview of the 5th evaluation campaign of natural language processing and speech tools for Italian

EVALITA1 is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for the Italian language. The aim of the campaign is to improve and support the development and dissemination of resources and technologies for Italian. Indeed, many shared tasks, covering the analysis of both written and spoken language at various levels of processing, have been proposed within EVALITA since its first edition in 2007. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics2 (AILC) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association of Speech Science3 (AISV) and by the NLP Special Interest Group of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence4 (AI∗IA). Following the success of the four previous editions, we organised EVALITA 2016 around a set of six shared tasks and an application challenge. In EVALITA 2016 several novelties were introduced on the basis of the outcome of two questionnaires and of the fruitful discussion that took place during the panel "Raising Interest and Collecting Suggestions on the EVALITA Evaluation Campaign" held in the context of the second Italian Computational Linguistics Conference (CLiC-it 2015) (Sprugnoli et al., 2016). Examples of these novelties are a greater involvement of industrial companies in the organisation of tasks, the introduction of a task and a challenge that are strongly application-oriented, and the creation of cross-task shared data. Also, a strong focus has been placed on using social media data, so as to promote the investigation into the portability and adaptation of existing tools, up to now mostly developed for the newswire domain.