This volume contains the papers prepared for the 2nd International Conference on Natural Language Processing, held 2-4 June in Patras, Greece. The conference program features invited talks and submitted papers, c- ering a wide range of NLP areas: text segmentation, morphological analysis, lexical knowledge acquisition and representation, grammar formalism and s- tacticparsing,discourse analysis,languagegeneration,man-machineinteraction, machine translation, word sense disambiguation, and information extraction. The program committee received 71 abstracts, of which unfortunately no more than 50% could be accepted. Every paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers. The fairness of the reviewing process is demonstrated by the broad spread of institutions and countries represented in the accepted papers. So many have contributed to the success of the conference. The primary credit, ofcourse, goes to theauthors andto the invitedspeakers. By theirpapers and their inspired talks they established the quality of the conference. Secondly, thanks should go to the referees and to the program committee members who did a thorough and conscientious job. It was not easy to select the papers to be presented. Last, but not least, my special thanks to the organizing committee for making this conference happen.

Table of Contents:
Tokenization, Morphological Analysis.- Parsing Asymmetries.- Universal Segmentation of Text with the Sumo Formalism.- Functional Decomposition and Lazy Word-Parsing in Modern Greek.- Recognition and Acquisition of Compound Names from Corpora.- Lexical Knowledge Representation.- Use of a Morphosyntactic Lexicon as the Basis for the Implementation of the Greek Wordnet.- On Verb Selectional Restrictions: Advantages and Limitations.- Some Principles for Implementing Underspecification in NLP Systems.- HYPERTAGS: Beyond POS Tagging.- Parsing.- A Theory of Stochastic Grammars.- Monte-Carlo Sampling for NP-Hard Maximization Problems in the Framework of Weighted Parsing.- Preprocessing for Unification Parsing of Spoken Language.- A Semantic Based Approach for Spontaneous Spoken Dialogue Understanding.- Parsing, Discourse Analysis.- A Practical Chunker for Unrestricted Text.- A Distributed Approach for a Robust and Evolving NLP System.- An Incremental Discourse Parser Architecture.- A Spatio-temporal Model for the Representation of Situations Described in Narrative Texts.- Anaphora Resolution.- Enhancing Preference-Based Anaphora Resolution with Genetic Algorithms.- Anaphora Resolution through Dialogue Adjacency Pairs and Topics.- Semantic Knowledge-Driven Method to Solve Pronominal Anaphora in Spanish Texts.- Processing of Spanish Definite Descriptions with the Same Head.- Anaphora Resolution, Machine Translation.- Constraints, Linguistic Theories, and Natural Language Processing.- A Comparison of Rule-Based and Machine Learning Methods for Identifying Non-nominal It.- Constitution and exploitation of an annotation system of electronic corpora: Toward automatic generation of understandable pronouns in French language.- Generation of Spanish Zero-Pronouns into English.- Combining Different Translation Sources.- Machine Translation, Language Generation.- Parsing and Collocations.- Contextual Reasoning in Speech-to-Speech Translation.- Improving the Accuracy of Speech Recognition Systems for Professional Translators.- Generic Parsing and Hybrid Transfer in Automatic Translation.- Two Applications for a Non-context French Generator.- Man-Machine Interaction, Word Sense Recognition/Disambiguation.- From Language to Motion, and Back: Generating and Using Route Descriptions.- Corpus Based Methodology in the Study and Design of Systems with Emulated Linguistic Competence.- Dialogues for Embodied Agents in Virtual Environments.- Concordancing Revised or How to Aid the Recognition of New Senses in Very Large Corpora.- Learning Rules for Large-Vocabulary Word Sense Disambiguation: A Comparison of Various Classifiers.- Information Extraction.- Greek Verb Semantic Processing for Stock Market Text Mining.- Extracting Semistructured Data - Lessons Learnt.- A Term-Based Methodology for Template Creation in Information Extraction.- A System for Recognition of Named Entities in Greek.