IJCNLP 2004 heralded a new era for computational linguistics and natural l- guage processing in Asia, as it coincided with the launching of the Asian F- eration of NLP Associations (AFNLP) in Sanya, Hainan, China. This was a timely development for the most populous and linguistically diversi?ed region in the world, and there is little wonder that this conference managed to draw over 200 participants. Following an enthusiastic response to the call for papers from 19regionsand the vigorousand rigorouse?ortsof the ProgramCommittee Co-chairs, the sizable collection of papers presented at this conference enabled AFNLP to be compared with related organizations such as COLING and ACL, which have been in existence for more than 40 years. Theorganizersrecognizedthatitisimportantforseriousattemptstobemade to increaseandimprovee?ortsinthis areaallacrossAsia.Towardsthisend,and to contribute to a better awarenessof topical issues, IJCNLP 2004 included two panels of special interest: (1) Panel on Emerging Asian Language Processing E?orts, and (2) Panel on Multilingual NLP for Public Information Services, which was devoted to the NLP requirements envisioned by the organizers of the 2008 Olympics.
There were also two thematic sessions on (a) Natural Language TechnologyinMobileInformationRetrievalandTextProcessingUserInterfaces, and(b)TextMininginBiomedicine.Theo?eringsofthisconferencewerefurther enriched by tutorials and workshops as well as an Asian Symposium on Natural Language Processing to Overcome Language Barriers, organized as a satellite eventbytheInstitute ofElectronics,InformationandCommunicationEngineers (IEICE) and the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) of Japan.