The ever-growing number of people who interact on social media opens opportunities to study language use across several sociolinguistics dimensions. By nature, user-generated texts on social media are indeed informal, featuring linguistic patterns from spoken language. 

Among the dimensions of variation in language, diatopic variation (i.e., variation across space) is one of the dominant ones, especially when it comes to Italy. Indeed, "there is probably no other area in Europe in which such a profusion of linguistic variation is concentrated into so small a geographical area" (Maiden & Parry, 1997). As one of the most linguistically-diverse landscapes in Europe, Italy comprises a large number of local languages, dialects, and regional varieties of Standard Italian (i.e., regional Italian) (Ramponi, 2022). Although Italian speakers try to adhere to a standard language (i.e., Standard Italian) when addressing the public, in online fora (e.g., Twitter) they often tend to employ words, constructions, or clauses in their own local language, dialect, or regional variant as a way to signal their social identities.

This makes the study of variation in Italy compelling from multiple perspectives, from computational linguistics – which can leverage social media data to discover regional and dialectal patterns and ultimately improve language technologies for Italian and minority languages – to sociolinguistics – which can be informed by large-scale, quantitative analyses to enrich and complement current linguistic atlases.

The GeoLingIt shared task aims at advancing the current knowledge of linguistic variation in Italy through the design and evaluation of methods for the prediction of locations of social media posts from Twitter (coordinates or coarse areas) based solely on linguistic content. 

In contrast to previous geolocation shared tasks on other areas (Han et al., 2016; Gaman et al., 2020; Chakravarthi et al., 2021), GeoLingIt is focused on Italy, and each post is filtered to contain non-standard Italian language, so that methods and findings will be strongly focused on non-standard Italian language variation rather than on highly-localized lexical items (e.g., mentions of events, places, or tourist attractions).

Linguistic variation in GeoLingIt data can manifest with just single words or phrases (i.e., items in a local language, dialect, or regional synonyms – e.g., guaglione, toso, picciotto for "young man"), with code-switching (i.e., alternation of Standard Italian and a local language, dialect, or regional variant), or as entire posts written in a specific local language or dialect.

Learn more on the task (with associated tracks and subtasks), the data (with examples), and how to participate!

• Nov 10, 2022 – Registration to GeoLingIt opens (you can register here!)

• Feb 7, 2023 – The data (train and dev) and the evaluation scorer are provided to participants

• May 7-17, 2023 – Evaluation window: participants submit predictions on the provided test data

• Jun 16, 2023 – Submission deadline for system description papers by participants

• Jul 12, 2023 – Notification of papers' acceptance to participants

• Jul 25, 2023 – Camera-ready papers due

• Sep 7-8, 2023 – EVALITA 2023 Workshop in Parma, Italy