Regular Papers -- A Natural Language Model and a System for Managing TV-Anytime Information from Mobile Devices -- State- and Object Oriented Specification of Interactive VoiceXML Information Services -- Interpreting Semi-formal Utterances in Dialogs about Mathematical Proofs -- Event Ordering Using TERSEO System -- The Role of User Profiles in Context-Aware Query Processing for the Semantic Web -- Deriving FrameNet Representations: Towards Meaning-Oriented Question Answering -- Lightweight Natural Language Database Interfaces -- Ontology-Driven Question Answering in AquaLog -- Schema-Based Natural Language Semantic Mapping -- Avaya Interactive Dashboard (AID): An Interactive Tool for Mining the Avaya Problem Ticket Database -- Information Modeling: The Process and the Required Competencies of Its Participants -- Experimenting with Linguistic Tools for Conceptual Modelling: Quality of the Models and Critical Features -- Language Resources and Tools for Supporting the System Engineering Process -- A Linguistics-Based Approach for Use Case Driven Analysis Using Goal and Scenario Authoring -- Effectiveness of Index Expressions -- Concept Similarity Measures the Understanding Between Two Agents -- Concept Indexing for Automated Text Categorization -- Acquiring Selectional Preferences from Untagged Text for Prepositional Phrase Attachment Disambiguation -- Semantic Enrichment for Ontology Mapping -- Testing Word Similarity: Language Independent Approach with Examples from Romance -- Language Modeling for Effective Construction of Domain Specific Thesauri -- Populating a Database from Parallel Texts Using Ontology-Based Information Extraction -- A Generic Coordination Model for Pervasive Computing Based on Semantic Web Languages -- Improving Web Searching Using Descriptive Graphs -- An Unsupervised WSD Algorithm for a NLP System -- Enhanced Email Classification Based on Feature Space Enriching -- Synonymous Paraphrasing Using WordNet and Internet -- Automatic Report Generation from Ontologies: The MIAKT Approach -- A Flexible Workbench for Document Analysis and Text Mining -- Short Papers -- Towards Linguistic Foundations of Content Management -- Constructing Natural Knowledge Ontologies to Implement Semantic Organizational Memory -- Improving the Naming Process for Web Site Reverse Engineering -- On Embedding Machine-Processable Semantics into Documents -- Using IR Techniques to Improve Automated Text Classification -- Architecture of a Medical Information Extraction System -- Improving Information Retrieval in MEDLINE by Modulating MeSH Term Weights -- Identification of Composite Named Entities in a Spanish Textual Database -- ORAKEL: A Natural Language Interface to an F-Logic Knowledge Base -- Accessing an Information System by Chatting -- Ontology-Based Question Answering in a Federation of University Sites: The MOSES Case Study -- Semantic Tagging and Chunk-Parsing in Dynamic Modeling -- Semantic Filtering of Textual Requirements Descriptions.

Welcome to NLDB04, the Ninth International Conference on the Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, held at the University of Salford, UK d- ing June 23-25, 2004. NLDB04 follows on the success of previous conferences held since 1995. Early conferences then known as Application of Natural Language to Databases, hence the acronym NLDB, were used as a forum to discuss and disse- nate research on the integration of natural language and databases and were mainly concerned with natural language based queries, database modelling and user int- faces that facilitate access to information. The conference has since moved to enc- pass all aspects of Information Systems and Software Engineering. Indeed, the use of natural language in systems modelling has greatly improved the development process and benefited both developers and users at all stages of the software development process. The latest developments in the field of natural language and the emergence of new technologies has seen a shift towards storage of large semantic electronic dictionaries, their exploitation and the advent of what is now known as the semantic web. Inf- mation extraction and retrieval, document and content management, ontology dev- opment and management and natural language conversational systems are becoming regular tracks in the last NLDB conferences. NLDB04 has seen a 50% increase in the number of submissions and has est- lished itself as one of the leading conferences in the area of applying natural language to information systems in its broader sense.