The 16th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information
Systems (NLDB 2011) was held during June 28–30, 2011, at the University
of Alicante, Spain. Since the first NLDB conference in 1995, the main
goal has been to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of research
on the integration of natural language resources within the field of information
system engineering.
The development and convergence of computing, telecommunications and
information systems has already led to a revolution in the way that we work,
communicate with each other, buy goods and use services, and even in the way
we entertain and educate ourselves. As the revolution continues, large volumes of
information are increasingly stored in a manner which is more natural for users to
exploit than the data presentation formats typical of legacy computer systems.
Natural language processing (NLP) is crucial to solving these problems and
language technologies are indispensable to the success of information systems.
We hope that NLDB 2011 was a modest contribution toward this goal.
NLDB 2011 contributed to the increase in the number of goals and the international
standing of NLP conferences, largely due to its Program Committee, whose members are renowned researchers in the field of NLP and information
system engineering. These high standards which have been set for NLDB can
also be measured by the significant number of papers submitted (74) in this
edition. Each paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee
or by their recommended subreviewers. As a result of the review process, 11
articles were accepted as regular papers and another 11 were accepted as short
papers. Additional contributions were selected for the Poster and the Doctoral
Symposium sessions held at the conference.
Finally, we would like to thank all the reviewers for their involvement and
excellent work. We extend these thanks to our invited speakers, Michael Thelwall
and Horacio Saggion, for their valuable contribution, which undoubtedly
increased the interest in the conference. We would also like to express our gratitude
to the people who helped in the organization of the different parts of the
conference program. We would especially like to thank Miguel Angel Var´o for
setting up and maintaing all Web services for the conference.
