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...