ABOUT THIS BOOK This book is intended for researchers who want to keep abreast of cur- rent developments in corpus-based natural language processing. It is not meant as an introduction to this field; for readers who need one, several entry-level texts are available, including those of (Church and Mercer, 1993; Charniak, 1993; Jelinek, 1997). This book captures the essence of a series of highly successful work- shops held in the last few years. The response in 1993 to the initial Workshop on Very Large Corpora (Columbus, Ohio) was so enthusias- tic that we were encouraged to make it an annual...