EACL

This volume contains the papers prepared for the Ninth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held 8-12 June in Bergen, Norway.The conference programme features invited talks, tutorials, submitted papers in both main and student sessions and a poster and demo session.The main session Programme Committee received 99 abstracts from 20 countries around the world. Every paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers via a web-based interface which preserved anonymity. The fairness of the process is we think demonstrated by the broad spread of institutions and countries represented in the papers which were accepted and are printed here: 29 papers from 12 countries, with no country having more than 6 papers. The topics of the accepted papers cover a wide range of topics, and taken together we think they present an exciting and up-to-date sample of the best work in our field at the present time.We used a new web-based approach to managing the paper submission and reviewing process this year, with authors registering an intention to submit electronically, and web-based reviewing processes, while at the same time retaining paper submission of the manuscripts themselves. We've had a lot of positive feedback about the reviewing system from the Programme Committee. We hope the system worked for authors as well.The student sessions have become an integral part of the EACL conferences. They provide an invaluable opportunity for young researchers to present their work to the community and receive feedback for future activities. In this spirit, we kept the tradition of encouraging students to submit not only papers presenting completed work (like for the main sessions), but also reports on work in progress.We received 17 submissions from 8 countries, of which we accepted 8 papers for presentation and two as reserve papers. Each submission was reviewed at least by two student reviewers and one faculty reviewer.