CICLing 2004 was the 5th Annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics; see www.CICLing.org. CICLing conferences are intended to provide a balanced view of the cutting-edge developments in both 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. These conferences are a forum for dialogue between the specialists working in the two areas. This year we were honored by the presence of our invited speakers Martin KayofStanfordUniversity,PhilipResnikoftheUniversityofMaryland,Ricardo Baeza-Yates of the University of Chile, and Nick Campbell of the ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories. They delivered excellent extended lectures and organized vivid discussions. Of129submissionsreceived(74fullpapersand44shortpapers),aftercareful international reviewing 74 papers were selected for presentation (40 full papers and35shortpapers),writtenby176authorsfrom21countries:Korea(37),Spain (34), Japan (22), Mexico (15), China (11), Germany (10), Ireland (10), UK (10), Singapore (6), Canada (3), Czech Rep. (3), France (3), Brazil (2), Sweden (2), Taiwan (2), Turkey (2), USA (2), Chile (1), Romania (1), Thailand (1), and The Netherlands (1); the ?gures in parentheses stand for the number of authors from the corresponding country.