The topic this book addresses originated from a panel discussion at the 2004 ACM SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) Conference held in Seattle, Washington, USA. We the editors or- nized the panel to promote discussion on how text mining and natural l- guageprocessing, tworelatedtopicsoriginatingfromverydi?erentdisciplines, can best interact with each other, and bene't from each other s strengths. It attracted a great deal of interest and was attended by 200 people from all over the world. We then guest-edited a special issue of ACM SIGKDD Exp- rations on...