10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Preface The preparation of the Fifth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics was done, without doubt, under extraordinary circumstances. To characterize the situation one only has to remember that since the Manchester conference there have been four governments on the territory of the former GDR, differing in every imaginable respect. The change in autumn 1989 and the unification on 3 October 1990-the two outstanding events-were accompanied by an immense number of radical political, economic, and social changes which were not without consequences on the preparation of this conference. We therefore ask for your understanding; not everything went as we wanted and there were some mishaps in preparing the conference which we regret very nmch. The main reason for this trouble was the inadequacy of communications, which did not improve to a degree necessary for a smooth handling of the organization. That nevertheless everything went comparatively well is mainly due to two different facts: on the one hand to the energy and enthusiasm which some of our collaborators put in to making a successful outcome possible. We particularly want to thank them here. On the other hand it is also due to the generous financial support which (although not in every case meant for the conference) raised our technical and other facilities to a level allowing more effective work during the last months. This holds above all for the financial aid we received from the Federal Minister of Research and Technology. Finally, we would like to extend our gratitude to the project group KIT-FAST of the Technical University of Berlin, who helped us with their communication facilities. We received 186 papers which were reviewed and, in addition, about 25 contributions which, in spite of a postponement of the deadline for ten days, unfortunately could not be taken into account. Since the programme permitted only 50 papers contributions of high quality had sometimes to be rejected. With very few exceptions the referees have done their work properly and in time, and the members of the programe committee, each of them responsible fi)r one or several sub-fields, have handled the flood of papers in a competent and committed way. Each paper was reviewed by four referees who had to send one copy of their report to the member of the programme committee responsible for that sub-field and another to the programme chair. On this basis the members of …