ABOUT THIS BOOK This book is intended for researchers who want to keep
abreast of cur- rent developments in corpus-based natural language
processing. It is not meant as an introduction to this field; for
readers who need one, several entry-level texts are available, including
those of (Church and Mercer, 1993; Charniak, 1993; Jelinek, 1997). This
book captures the essence of a series of highly successful work- shops
held in the last few years. The response in 1993 to the initial Workshop
on Very Large Corpora (Columbus, Ohio) was so enthusias- tic that we
were encouraged to make it an annual event. The following year, we
staged the Second Workshop on Very Large Corpora in Ky- oto. As a way of
managing these annual workshops, we then decided to register a special
interest group called SIGDAT with the Association for Computational
Linguistics. The demand for international forums on corpus-based NLP has
been expanding so rapidly that in 1995 SIGDAT was led to organize not
only the Third Workshop on Very Large Corpora (Cambridge, Mass. ) but
also a complementary workshop entitled From Texts to Tags (Dublin).
Obviously, the success of these workshops was in some measure a re-
flection of the growing popularity of corpus-based methods in the NLP
community. But first and foremost, it was due to the fact that the work-
shops attracted so many high-quality papers.
