This year at CLiC-it, one session of the conference will be devoted to a discussion with Prof. Paola Merlo, conceived as a space for critical discussion on key areas of research in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, with a focus on both theoretical developments and applied scenarios within these disciplines.
The discussion will take place in an interview format. With the aim of promoting active and inclusive participation, a call for interest has been launched, open to all interested participants - with a special focus on young researchers - to collect questions in advance to be addressed to Prof. Merlo during the interview.

Questions may cover a wide range of topics related to research in these areas, including (but not limited to):

• current challenges and emerging methodologies in NLP and computational linguistics;

• future research directions, particularly in relation to the evolution of language models and recent transformations in the field of artificial intelligence;

• dialogue between computational and theoretical approaches in the study of language;

• interdisciplinary implications and possible impacts on the study of formal linguistics, cognitive linguistics, or psycholinguistics;

• the role of ethics and social responsibility in the development of NLP systems, especially with regard to the processing of natural language.