International Conference CLARC 2023

Last week, Rijeka hosted one of the most significant international conferences in the field of language and language data - CLARC 2023. The event was organized by the Center for Language Research (CLAR) at the University of Rijeka, with the support of the Croatian branches of the CLARIN and DARIAH consortia.

The central theme of the conference, "Language and Language Data," attracted a large number of scientists, researchers, and experts from various disciplines. The conference covered a wide range of areas and topics, including language technology, linguistics, corpus linguistics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, pragmalinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language and cultural studies, as well as language data from legal and economic perspectives, language and tourism, and medicine and public health.

One of the key elements of the conference was the invited presentations. Participants had the opportunity to listen to lectures from prominent experts such as Maja Miličević Petrović from the University of Bologna, Marko Tadić from the University of Zagreb, Tony Veale from University College Dublin (UCD), and Nikola Ljubešić from the "Jožef Stefan" Institute.

In addition to lectures, the conference offered various events such as a panel on the transformation of linguistic studies and the results of the UPSKILLS project (Upgrading the Skills of Linguistics and Language Students), a round table on career transitions from linguistics to data science, and a round table on linguistics and large language models. Participants also had the opportunity to take part in the co-organized event RIKON 2023, the largest fantasy convention in Croatia.

We hope that this collaboration and exchange of ideas will continue to shape the future of linguistics and language technologies, and we look forward to the inspiring events that future conferences will bring. More details are available on the official website of CLARC 2023: https://cji.uniri.hr/clarc2023.