Preface
This volume contains the papers presented at the workshop entitled: Software Engineering &
Architecture for Language Technology Systems.  The workshop was held on May 31, 2003, and
sponsored by the Human Language Technology Conference and North American Chapter of the
Associationfor ComputationalLinguistics.Thepaperswererefereedby an internationalpanelof
experts in the field.
This Workshop is the first held under the auspices of the ACL to be directed at issues in software
engineeringandarchitecturefor languagetechnology. It maybe surprisingthatwe have waitedso
longto directour attentionovertlyto the topic,but therehave many peopledealingwiththe prob-
lemsof the fieldwellbeforewe conceived of this Workshop.Theirwork and interestshas leadto
strong support for the workshop and we are very happy to see the hidden activities of so many
people come into a more visible arena.
With the creation of this workshop came also the question of defining the scope of the topic. We
received a number of good quality papers on topics which in the end we determined where not
within the sphere of interest intended for the workshop. These were all papers that developed
algorithms for certain computational linguistics problems such as parsing and n-gram manipula-
tion.
This decision has lead us to a partially de facto definition of the workshop topic, namely the
description of methods for creating complex systems of interacting functionality of diverse com-
ponentsin the computationallinguisticsfield.Thisdescriptiongives scopeto the two maintypes
papers  represented in the workshop. The first type of paper deals with the architectural organisa-
tionof completedsystemsandtheissuesin creatingsuccessfulinteractionbetweenheterogeneous
components. The second type of paper is the speculative paper that proposes new methods or
approaches to language processing tasks without necessarily demonstrating that such methods
have been verified in practice. These papers were deemed meritorious when they exhibited
insights that the referees considered to be innovative and promising. To create some demarcation
between the speculative and the verified we have allowed a longer presentation time to the com-
pleted works than the speculative work.
 The collection  of researchers and language industry engineers who need to more effectively
managelarge systemsis growing,as wellas greatereffort to designsystemsthatmoreeffectively
interactwiththoseof others.Given suchgrowththe workshoporganiserswilluse thisoccasionto
assess the breadth of interest to create a Special Interest Group in the field.
We wish to thank the members of the Program Committee for reviewing the large number of
workshopsubmissionson a very tightschedule.We wouldalsolike to thankEd Hovy, JasonEis-
ner and Dragomir Radev for making the workshop
possible.
Jon Patrick, Sydney Language Technology Research Group, University of Sydney
Hamish Cunningham,University of Sheffield
Program Committee
Kenji Araki, Hokkaido University
Xabier Artola Zubillaga, IXA, University of the Basque Country
Stephen Beale, Computer Research Lab, New Mexico State University
Stephen Bird, Melbourne University
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield
Walter Daelemans, Universities of Antwerp and Tilburg
Thierry DeClerck, University of Saarland (CL-Lab) and DFKI (LT-lab)
Bill Dolan, Microsoft Research, Redmond
Alistair Knott, Otago University
Mark Maybury, MITRE Corporation
Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield
Alan Marwick, IBM, TJ Watson Laboratory
Cecile Paris, CSIRO, Australia
Yorick Wilks, Sheffield University
Ming Zhou, Microsoft Research, Beijing
Further Reviewers
Hisayuki Sasaoka, Asahikawa National College of Technology
Hiroshi Echizen-ya, Hokkai-Gakuen University, Japan
Stephen Bouwens, University of Sydney
Xabier Arregi, IXA, University of the Basque Country
Koldo Gojenola Galletebeitia, Industria Ingeniaritza Teknikorako Unibertsitate Eskola (IITUE)
Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza Sánchez, IXA, University of the Basque Country
Steven Bird, Melbourne University
Corrin Lakeland, Otago University
Youngja Park, IBM, TJ Watson Laboratory
David Ferrucci,  IBM, TJ Watson Laboratory
Mary Neff, IBM, TJ Watson Laboratory
