Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We are delighted to present you with this volume containing the papers accepted for presentation at the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held in Athens, Greece, from March 30th till April 3rd 2009. EACL 2009 received yet another record-breaking number of submissions, with 360 valid submissions against 264 for EACL 2006 and 181 for EACL 2003. Thanks to the new policy adopted by EACL regarding modes of presentation, we were nonetheless able to accept 100 papers (of which 2 were later withdrawn), achieving a healthy acceptance rate of 28% against only 20% in 2006 and 27% in 2003. Indeed, in 2009, the EACL conference will renew its format by having the main conference papers presented either as regular talks or as posters, with posters getting both a ten-minute quick-fire presentation in a thematic session and a one-hour discussion period in a traditional poster session. EACL 2009 will thus feature 41 posters and 57 talks, all with equal status in terms of quality and appearance in the proceedings. Not only does this move towards a balanced mix of traditional talks, quick-fire presentations and poster sessions allow us to maintain a reasonable acceptance rate, we also believe that it will increase interaction between researchers and contribute to a more lively scientific exchange. The increased number of submissions naturally comes with an increased reviewing load and we are greatly indebted to the 11 area chairs who recruited 449 reviewers and managed the reviewing process in their areas. Each paper submission was reviewed by three reviewers, who were furthermore encouraged to discuss any divergences they might have, and the papers in each area were ranked by the area chair. The final selection was made by the program co-chairs after an independent check of all reviews and discussions with the area chairs.