On 25 and 26 June 2020, the fourth edition of the International Scientific Conference “Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria” took place (CLIB 2020: https://dcl.bas.bg/clib/). The forum was held in a mixed format – in person (in “Prof. Marin Drinov” hall of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and online with the help of a platform for video conferencing. The conference was broadcast live on the channel of the Department of Computational Linguistics on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxcyvtRrlcnpsiPIyf1xWWw.

The mission of the conference, which was launched in 2014, is to deepen and upgrade the cooperation between Bulgarian scientists who conduct research in the field of computational linguistics in Bulgaria and around the world and foreign scientists developing language technologies applicable to Bulgarian language.

Eighty-five participants from over 10 countries registered to participate in the conference: Bulgaria, Great Britain, Germany, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, Switzerland, Japan, and the interest in it can be judged by the number of views of the recordings: nearly 500 times since the holding of conference.

During the conference, three plenary reports were presented by leading Bulgarian scientists in the field of computational linguistics who presented their achievements in current scientific fields: the identification of image content (Prof. Galya Angelova, DSc), processing and extraction of information from specialized (medical) documents (Assoc. Prof. Svetla Boytcheva) and the recognition of false news in the information flow (Dr. Preslav Nakov). The program also included a special demonstration of the European Language Grid which was presented by the project coordinator Dr. Georg Rehm.

Within the main scientific program, 14 reports were presented, highlighting the achievements of researchers from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Japan and Switzerland. For the second time, a special scientific session was held dedicated to lexical-semantic networks and ontologies (5 reports).

The conference is organized by the Department of Computational Linguistics at the Institute of Bulgarian Language “Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin” and the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

CLIB 2020 is supported by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the Mosaic Technology company.