Conference Link: http://www.iceis.org

Foreword: Welcome to the 9th International Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science workshop, which is part of a series of workshops previously organised in Porto (2004), Miami (2005), Paphos (2006), Funchal (2007), Barcelona (2008), Milan (2009), Madeira (2010) and Copenhagen (2011). The aim of this workshop is to foster interactions among researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by taking a Cognitive Science perspective. What characterizes this kind of approach is the fact that NLP is considered from various viewpoints (linguistics, psychology, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence), and that a deliberate effort is made to reconcile or integrate them into a coherent whole. We believe that this is necessary, as the modelling of the process is simply too complex to be addressed by a single discipline. Any system, —be it natural (people), artificial (computers) or a combination of both (interactive NLP),— is obliged to draw on many knowledge sources. Yet, strategies may vary considerably depending on the person (novice, expert), on the available knowledge (internal and external), and on the nature of the information processor: man, machine or both (man-machine communication, interactive NLP). NLPCS 2012 has received 23 papers from 15 countries, of which 13 were selected for presentation as full papers or poster. The papers covered a wide range of topics like opinion mining, morphological disambiguation, parsing, decision modelling, reference generation, automatic extraction of concepts, ontology mapping and development of a natural language based shape grammar. The keynote speaker was Professor Amy Neustein, CEO and founder of Linguistic, Technology Systems, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Speech Technology (Springer Verlag), as well as series editor of SpringerBriefs, and Speech Processing Technology. Her keynote lecture, entitled “Think before you Talk: The Role of Cognitive Science in Natural Language Processing”, examined the advantages of invoking a cognitive science framework to resolve some of the persistent problems compromising the performance of natural language systems. The two co-chairs of this workshop would like to thank the members of the programme committee for their invaluable help, as well as the authors for their contributions. Special thanks go to the local organisers and their administrative staff for their hard work and support during this event. We hope you will find the Workshop a stimulating opportunity for meeting colleagues and friends, old and new, and that you will return home enriched with new ideas and pleasant memories linked to NLPCS 2012. Looking forwards to seeing you at NLPCS 2013. (More)

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