The Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria, Sofia, held on September 4th, 2014 
At the Hilton hotel in Sofia, on September 4th, the First International Conference “Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria” was held, organized by the Department of Computational Linguistics of the Institute of Bulgarian Language, affiliated with the Bulgarian Academy of Science, the Faculty of Slavic studies, and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Sofia. 
The conference was attended by about fifty participants, including international guests. 
The event was organized within the framework of the project Integrating New Practices and Knowledge in Undergraduate and Graduate Courses in Computational Linguistics (2012-2014), financed by national and European funds. 
The proceedings of the Conference are accessible on the Web. 
The conference was commenced by the suitable speech delivered by Dr Svetla Koeva, director of the Institute of Bulgarian Language. 
The conference gathered mainly younger researchers in the field of computational linguistics in Bulgaria, apart from two guest lecturers, Eric Laporte and Cvetana Krstev. 
Professor Eric Laporte from the University Marne-la-Valée (France), in his report Interaction between Linguists and Machine Learning discussed the relation between two basic contemporary trends in language processing, one of which is based on linguistic modelling of language knowledge, and the other on methods of machine learning, and how they are used in the building of hybrid systems. 
He emphasized the significance of formalization of linguistic knowledge in building of such systems. 
Another guest lecturer, Professor Cvetana Krstev presented three lexical resources for Serbian that are the basis for the development of applications in the culinary domain based on natural language processing. 
She presented how each of these resources is used to correct and enlarge the other two. 
Participants in the conference were mainly younger researchers and representatives of the companies which use language technologies. 
Among scientific papers a noticeable attention was attracted by the group of papers dealing with expanding and exploitation of the WordNet in Bulgarian. 
Worth attention is also an interesting contribution on categorization of polylexical units and named entities by Ivelina Stojanova. 
Ivan Deržanski with his collaborators showed resources used in teaching mathematical linguistics, aimed at systematic practicing for linguistic Olympiads. 
The same author, together with Olena Siruk, gave an interesting and useful analysis of translations of adverbial phrases based on the aligned Bulgarian-Ukrainian corpus. 
As a part of the conference there was an exhibition of software products, among which three were especially interesting: the system with language support for working with geographical data, the system Bulgariana – Bulgarian version of Europeana, and the presentation of the project Mosaica4 with an interactive map of Bulgarian dialects. 
The conference was preceded by a three days’ intensive Workshop on Finite-State Language Resources and the use of Unitex system, held by Cvetana Krstev, Eric Laporte and Duško Vitas. 
The course programme covered local grammars, various mechanisms for description of inflectional processes, dictionary graphs as well as applications of this system in research work and industry. 
The course was attended by fifteen young collaborators of the Institute of Bulgarian Language. 
