Processes and participants -- Conceptual structures of multicontexts -- Graph drawing methods -- Big posets of participatings and thematic roles -- Linguistic Geometry tools generate optimal solutions -- Natural language text processing and the maximal join operator -- DB-MAT: Knowledge acquisition, processing and NL generation using conceptual graphs -- Conceptual graph aboutness -- Conceptual structures and structured documents -- Conceptual graphs isomorphism: Algorithm and use -- Editing conceptual graphs -- Computational situation theory in the conceptual graph language -- Existential graphs and tense logic -- Microanalysis: Acquiring database semantics in conceptual graphs -- Propagating truth and detecting contradiction in conceptual graph databases -- Sound and complete forward and backward chainings of graph rules -- Towards fuzzy conceptual graph programs -- Sparse term encoding for dynamic taxonomies -- Lattice embedding -- Local scaling in conceptual data systems.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS '96, held in Sydney, Australia, in August 1996. The book presents five full papers by the invited speakers together with 15 revised full papers selected for presentation at the conference from a respectable number of submissions. The issues addressed are natural language processing, information retrieval, graph operations, conceptual graph and Peirce theory, knowledge acquisition, theorem proving and CG programming, and order-based organisation and encoding.