Dear Corpora members,
We are happy to announce that, in the context of EVALITA (the 9th evaluation campaign of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian), we are organizing Cruciverb-IT, the first shared task on crossword puzzle solving.
*Task Description:* This Shared Task aims to challenge and assess NLP systems in the context of crossword solving and is organized around two subtasks: i) answering clues extracted from Italian crosswords; ii) autonomously solving Italian crossword grids.
We just released the training data at the following link: https://huggingface.co/datasets/cruciverb-it/evalita2026.
You can find all the information about the shared task on the official webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/cruciverbit2026
*Publication:* Participants in the shared task are invited to submit a paper to the EVALITA 2026 (https://www.evalita.it/campaigns/evalita-2026/) workshop, which will take place in Bari (Italy), 24-26 February 2026. Papers must follow the workshop submission instructions and will undergo regular peer review.
*Important Dates:* -- 22nd September 2025: development data available to participants -- 24th November - 1st December 2025: Cruciverb-IT evaluation window -- 15th December 2025: assessments returned to participants -- 9th January 2026: final reports due to task participants -- 16th January 2026: final reports due to task organizers -- 7th February 2026: review deadline -- 16th February 2026: camera-ready version deadline -- 26 – 27th February 2026: final workshop in Bari (Italy)
*Contact:* Mail: cruciverbit.evalita2026@gmail.com Website: https://sites.google.com/view/cruciverbit2026/
The Cruciverb-IT Shared Task Organizers: Cristiano Ciaccio (ItaliaNLP Lab, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli", CNR-ILC, Pisa) Gabriele Sarti (Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), University of Groningen, The Netherlands) Alessio Miaschi (ItaliaNLP Lab, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli", CNR-ILC, Pisa) Felice Dell'Orletta (ItaliaNLP Lab, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "A. Zampolli", CNR-ILC, Pisa) Malvina Nissim (Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), University of Groningen, The Netherlands)