EsTAL Espana for Natural Language Processing continued on from the three previous conferences: FracTAL, held at the Universit e de Franch-Comt e, Besan con (France) in December 1997, VexTAL, held at Venice International University, Ca Foscari (Italy), in November 1999, and PorTAL, held at the U- versidade do Algarve, Faro (Portugal), in June 2002. The main goals of these conferences have been: (i) to bring together the international NLP community; (ii) to strengthen the position of local NLP research in the international NLP community; and (iii) to provide a forum for discussion of new research and - plications. EsTAL contributed to achieving these goals and increasing the already high international standing of these conferences, largely due to its Program Comm- tee,composedofrenownedresearchersinthe?eldofnaturallanguageprocessing and its applications. This clearly contributed to the signi?cant number of papers submitted (72) by researchers from (18) di?erent countries. The scope of the conference was structured around the following main topics: (i)computational linguistics research (spoken and written language analysis and generation; pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and morphology; lexical - sources; word sense disambiguation; linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language; knowledge acquisition and representation; corpus-based and statistical language modelling; machine translation and translation aids; com- tationallexicography),and(ii)monolingualandmultilingualintelligentlanguage processing and applications (information retrieval, extraction and question - swering; automatic summarization; document categorization; natural language interfaces; dialogue systems and evaluation of systems).

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Adaptive Selection of Base Classifiers in One-Against-All Learning for Large Multi-labeled Collections.- Automatic Acquisition of Transfer Rules from Translation Examples.- Automatic Assessment of Open Ended Questions with a Bleu-Inspired Algorithm and Shallow NLP.- Automatic Phonetic Alignment and Its Confidence Measures.- Automatic Spelling Correction in Galician.- Baseline Methods for Automatic Disambiguation of Abbreviations in Jewish Law Documents.- Bayes Decision Rules and Confidence Measures for Statistical Machine Translation.- Character Identification in Children Stories.- Comparison and Evaluation of Two Approaches of a Multilayered QA System Applied to Temporality.- The Contents and Structure of the Context Base, and Its Application.- Developing a Minimalist Parser for Free Word Order Languages with Discontinuous Constituency.- Developing Competitive HMM PoS Taggers Using Small Training Corpora.- Exploring the Use of Target-Language Information to Train the Part-of-Speech Tagger of Machine Translation Systems.- Expressive Power and Consistency Properties of State-of-the-Art Natural Language Parsers.- An Independent Domain Dialogue System Through a Service Manager.- Information Retrieval in Digital Theses Based on Natural Language Processing Tools.- Integrating Conceptual Density with WordNet Domains and CALD Glosses for Noun Sense Disambiguation.- Intertwining Deep Syntactic Processing and Named Entity Detection.- Language Understanding Using n-multigram Models.- Multi-label Text Classification Using Multinomial Models.- A Multi-use Incremental Syntax-Semantic Interface.- Multiword Expression Translation Using Generative Dependency Grammar.- Named Entity Recognition Through Corpus Transformation and System Combination.- One Size Fits All? A Simple Technique to Perform Several NLP Tasks.- Ontology-Based Feature Transformations: A Data-Driven Approach.- On the Quality of Lexical Resources for Word Sense Disambiguation.- Reuse of Free Online MT Engines to Develop a Meta-system of Multilingual Machine Translation.- Semantic-Aided Anaphora Resolution in Large Corpora Development.- SemRol: Recognition of Semantic Roles.- Significance of Syntactic Features for Word Sense Disambiguation.- SisHiTra : A Hybrid Machine Translation System from Spanish to Catalan.- Smoothing and Word Sense Disambiguation.- Spelling Correction for Search Engine Queries.- A Statistical Study of the WPT-03 Corpus.- A Study of Chunk-Based and Keyword-Based Approaches for Generating Headlines.- Suffixal and Prefixal Morpholexical Relationships of the Spanish.- SuPor: An Environment for AS of Texts in Brazilian Portuguese.- Systemic Analysis Applied to Problem Solving: The Case of the Past Participle in French.- The Merging Problem in Distributed Information Retrieval and the 2-Step RSV Merging Algorithm.- Unsupervised Training of a Finite-State Sliding-Window Part-of-Speech Tagger.- Using Seed Words to Learn to Categorize Chinese Text.- On Word Frequency Information and Negative Evidence in Naive Bayes Text Classification.