Application of natural language to information systems (NLDB04)

The International Conference on Application of Natural Language to Information Systems is nearing its 10th birthday and has gained in maturity and in the quality of the papers submitted. In the early years, the conference was mainly concerned with the application of natural language to databases (hence the acronym NLDB), and to the development of information systems. It is very well know that the early stages of software development are very problematic as they involve many stakeholders and are mainly expressed in natural language, a source of all kind of ambiguities. However, the latest developments in the field of natural language and the emergence of new technologies has seen a shift towards storage of large semantic electronic dictionaries, their exploitation and the advent of what is now known as the semantic web. Information extraction and retrieval, document and content management, ontology development and management and natural language conversational systems are becoming regular tracks in the last NLDB conferences. NLDB04 was held at the University of Salford, United Kingdom from June 23 to 25, 1994 and has seen a 50% increase in the number of submissions and has established itself as one of the leading conferences in the area of applying natural language to information systems in its broader sense. 65 papers were submitted from 22 different countries. Twenty nine papers were accepted as regular papers, while 13 were accepted as short papers. Five of the highest rated papers were selected for publication in a special issue of the Data & Knowledge Engineering Journal