Rafael Munoz - Böcker

EsTAL - Espana " for Natural Language Processing - continued on from the three previous conferences: FracTAL, held at the Universit' e de Franch-Comt' e, Besan, con (France) in December 1997, VexTAL, held at Venice International University, Ca ' Foscari (Italy), in November 1999, and PorTAL, held at the U- versidade do Algarve, Faro (Portugal), in June 2002. The main goals of these conferences have been: (i) to bring together the international NLP community; (ii) to strengthen the position of local NLP research in the international NLP community; and (iii) to provide a forum for discussion of new research and - plications. EsTAL contributed to achieving these goals and increasing the already high international standing of these conferences, largely due to its Program Comm- tee,composedofrenownedresearchersinthe?eldofnaturallanguageprocessing and its applications. This clearly contributed to the signi?cant number of papers submitted (72) by researchers from (18) di?erent countries.The scope of the conference was structured around the following main topics: (i)computational linguistics research (spoken and written language analysis and generation; pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and morphology; lexical - sources; word sense disambiguation; linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language; knowledge acquisition and representation; corpus-based and statistical language modelling; machine translation and translation aids; com- tationallexicography),and(ii)monolingualandmultilingualintelligentlanguage processing and applications (information retrieval, extraction and question - swering; automatic summarization; document categorization; natural language interfaces; dialogue systems and evaluation of systems).

NLDB 2005, the 10th International Conference on Applications of Natural L- guage to Information Systems, was held on June 15–17, 2005 at the University of Alicante, Spain. Since the ?rst NLDB conference in 1995 the main goal has been to provide a forum to discuss and disseminate research on the integration of natural language resources in information system engineering. The development and convergence of computing, telecommunications and information systems has already led to a revolution in the way that we work, communicate with each other, buy goods and use services, and even in the way that weentertainandeducate ourselves.The revolutioncontinues,andoneof its results is that large volumes of information will increasingly be held in a form which is more natural for users than the data presentation formats typical of computer systems of the past. Natural language processing (NLP) is crucial in solving these problems, and language technologies will make an indispensable contribution to the success of information systems. We hope that NLDB 2005 was a modest contribution to this goal. NLDB 2005 contributed to advancing the goals and the high international standing of these conferences, largely due to its Program Committee, composed of renowned researchers in the ?eld of natural language processing and inf- mation system engineering. Papers were reviewed by three reviewers from the Program Committee. This clearly contributed to the signi?cant number of - pers submitted(95).Twenty-ninewereacceptedasregularpapers,while18were accepted as short papers.

This volume contains the papers presented at NLDB 2009, the 14th Inter- tional Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems held June 24–26, 2009, at the University of the Saarland and the German - search Center for Arti?cial Intelligence in Saarbruc ¨ ken, Germany. In addition to reviewed submissions, the program also included contributions to the doctoral symposiumheldduring NLDB2009aswellastwoinvitedtalks.Thesetalksc- ered some of the currently hot topics in the use of natural languagefor accessing information systems. Wereceived51submissionsasregularpapersforthemainconference,2extra submissions as posters, and 3 short papers for the doctoral symposium. Each paper for the main conference was assigned four reviewers, taking into account preferences expressed by the ProgramCommittee members as much as possible. Within the review deadline, we received at least three reviews for almost all submissions. After the review deadline, the Conference Organizing Committee members and the Program Committee Chair acted as meta-reviewers. This task included studying the reviews and the papers, speci?cally those whose assessment made them borderline cases, and discussing con?icting opinions and their impact on theassessmentofindividualpapers.Finally,themeta-reviewerswroteadditional reviews for the few papers which received less than three reviews, as well as for papers which received reviews with considerably con?icting assessments.