Advances in Natural Language Processing

PorTAL - Portugal for Natural Language Processing - follows two previous c- ferences: FracTAL, held at the Universit'e de Franche-Comt'e, Besan,con (France), in December 1997, and VexTAL, held at Venice International University, C'aF- cari (Italy), in November 1999. The main goals of theses conferences have been: (i) to bring together the NLP community in Europe; (ii) to strengthen the po- tion of local NLP research in the international NLP community; (iii) to provide a friendly forumfor discussion of new research and applications. PorTAL has recon?rmed this year the goals and the high international sta- ing of those conferences, largely due to its Program Committee, composed of renowned researchers in the ?eld of Natural Language Processing, a third of themfromPortuguese universities. This clearly contributed to the signi?cant number of papers submitted (48) by researchers from 12 di?erent countries. Each paper submitted was reviewed by three reviewers, either from the P- gram Committee or by their commitment. All those who contributed are m- tioned on the following pages.The review process led to the selection of 35 papers for oral presentation: 23 regular papers and 11 short papers. They have been published in this volume.