This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, held in Groningen, The Netherlands, in June 2012. The 12 full papers, 24 short papers and 16 poster papers presented in this volume together with a full-paper length invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The rapidly evolving state-of-the-art in NLP and the shifting interest to appcliations targeting document and data collections available on the Web, including an increasing amount of user generated content, is...