Natural language processing and information systems

The 12th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Infor- tion Systems (NLDB 2007) took place during June 27–29 in Paris (France). Since the first edition in 1995, the NLDB conference has been aiming at bringing together researchers, people working in industry and potential users interested in various - plications of natural language in the database and information system areas. Natural language and databases are core components in the development of inf- mation systems. NLP techniques may substantially enhance most phases of the information system lifecycle, starting with requirement analysis, specification and validation, and going up to conflict resolution, result processing and presentation. Furthermore, natural language-based query languages and user interfaces facilitate the access to information for all and allow for new paradigms in the usage of comput- ized services. Hot topics such as information retrieval and Semantic Web-based applications imply a complete fusion of databases and NLP techniques. Among an increasing number of submitted papers (110), the Program Committee selected 31 papers as full papers, thus coming up with an acceptance rate of 28%. These proceedings also include 12 short papers that were presented at the conference and two invited talks, one given by Andrew Basden and Heinz Klein and the other given by Max Silberztein.