The ninth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2023) was held from 30th November to 2nd December 2023 at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in the beautiful venue of the Auditorium Santa Margherita - Emanuele Severino. After the edition of 2020, which was organized in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, and CLiC-it 2021, which was held in hybrid mode, with CLiC-it 2023 we are back to a fully in-presence conference. Overall, almost 210 participants registered to the conference, confirming that the community is eager to meet in person and to enjoy both the scientific and social events together with the colleagues.

The opportunities afforded by the Internet greatly overshadow the challenges. While not forgetting this, we can nevertheless still address some of the problems that arise. Hate speech online is one such problem. But what exactly is hate speech online, and how can we deal with it effectively? As with freedom of expression, on- or offline, UNESCO defends the position that the free flow of information should always be the norm. Counter-speech is generally preferable to suppression of speech. And any response that limits speech needs to be very carefully weighed to ensure that this remains wholly exceptional, and that legitimate robust debate is not curtailed.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, TSD 2022, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2022. The 43 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The topical sections "Text", "Speech", and "Dialogue" deal with the following issues: speech recognition; corpora and language resources; speech and spoken language generation; tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech; semantic processing of text and speech; integrating applications of text and speech processing; automatic dialogue systems; multimodal techniques and modelling.

Identifying and stopping the dissemination of fabricated news, hate speech, or deceptive information camouflaged as legitimate news poses a significant technological hurdle. This book presents emergent methodologies and technological approaches of natural language processing through machine learning for counteracting the spread of fake news and hate speech on social media platforms. • Covers various approaches, algorithms, and methodologies for fake news and hate speech detection. • Explains the automatic detection and prevention of fake news and hate speech through paralinguistic clues on social media using artificial intelligence. • Discusses the application of machine learning models to learn linguistic characteristics of hate speech over social media platforms. • Emphasizes the role of multilingual and multimodal processing to detect fake news. • Includes research on different optimization techniques, case studies on the identification, prevention, and social impact of fake news, and GitHub repository links to aid understanding. The text is for professionals and scholars of various disciplines interested in fake news and hate speech detection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 40th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2018, held in Grenoble, France, in March 2018. The 39 full papers and 39 short papers presented together with 6 demos, 5 workshops and 3 tutorials, were carefully reviewed and selected from 303 submissions. Accepted papers cover the state of the art in information retrieval including topics such as: topic modeling, deep learning, evaluation, user behavior, document representation, recommendation systems, retrieval methods, learning and classication, and micro-blogs.

EVALITA 2023 is an initiative of AILC (Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV). As in the previous editions, EVALITA 2023 is organized along a set of selected tasks, which provide participants with opportunities to discuss and explore both emerging and traditional areas of Natural Language Processing and Speech for Italian. The participation is encouraged for teams working both in academic institutions and industrial organizations.