Proceedings of the fifth conference on Applied natural language processing

Little by little, we are learning how to do a better job in building natural language analyzers and generators. Our tool kit is slowly growing -- adding, in particular, in the last few years, better tools for learning language patterns from corpora. Of course, our tools are still quite primitive; when we look back at this time in later years we will be amazed at how much we didn't understand about natural language.But we are also learning to make better use of the tools we do have. We are coming to a better appreciation of how relatively simple tools -- morphological analyzers, name recognizers, phrase parsers, to name a few -- can be remarkably effective in particular applications. And from this appreciation has flowed a steadily increasing stream of natural language applications.It is this growing stream that we come here this week to nurture and reflect on. The Conferences on Applied Natural Language Processing are intended to highlight the ways in which natural language processing can be applied to real tasks. With the help of the program committee and other colleagues, we have made a particular effort this year to broaden the range of applications which are presented. Conferences above all are about exchanging ideas, and by stretching the range of the conference we hope to expose people to problems, to techniques, and to applications they might not have seen before. We have also provided an extensive program of demonstrations, ranging from early research prototypes to more mature commercial systems; there is nothing like a live demo to crystallize the problems and accomplishments in our field.In running an applied conference we are faced forever with the question of what is an "applied" paper. We have chosen to answer that question in an inclusive fashion, including several sessions which address basic technologies such as morphology, parsing, and sense disambiguation, which underlie many of our applications. As we build new applications, we are aware of how shortcomings in these basic technologies affect our design, so it is important to bring together people working on the technologies with those working on the applications.