CICLing 2003 (www.CICLing.org) was the 4th annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. It was intended to provide a balanced view of the cutting-edge developments in both the theoretical foundations of computational linguistics and the practice of natural language text processing with its numerous applications. A feature of CICLing conferences is their wide scope that covers nearly all areas of computational linguistics and all aspects of natural language processing applications. The conference is a forum for dialogue between the specialists working in these two areas. This year we were honored by the presence of our keynote speakers Eric Brill (Microsoft Research, USA), Aravind Joshi (U. Pennsylvania, USA), Adam Kilgarriff (Brighton U., UK), and Ted Pedersen (U. Minnesota, USA), who delivered excellent extended lectures and organized vivid discussions. Of 92 submissions received, after careful reviewing 67 were selected for presentation; 43 as full papers and 24 as short papers, by 150 authors from 23 countries: Spain (23 authors), China (20), USA (16), Mexico (13), Japan (12), UK (11), Czech Republic (8), Korea and Sweden (7 each), Canada and Ireland (5 each), Hungary (4), Brazil (3), Belgium, Germany, Italy, Romania, Russia and Tunisia (2 each), Cuba, Denmark, Finland and France (1 each).