Constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2008, held in London, UK, in June 2008. This work includes papers that are organized in topical sections on natural language processing and understanding, information retrieval, and document processing and text mining.

Invited Papers.- Sentence and Text Comprehension: Evidence from Human Language Processing.- Towards Semantic Search.- From Databases to Natural Language: The Unusual Direction.- Natural Language Processing and Understanding.- Division of Spanish Words into Morphemes with a Genetic Algorithm.- Abbreviation Disambiguation: Experiments with Various Variants of the One Sense per Discourse Hypothesis.- The Acquisition of Common Sense Knowledge by Being Told: An Application of NLP to Itself.- Natural Language Processing and Understanding.- Interlingua for French and German Topological Prepositions.- Ontological Profiles as Semantic Domain Representations.- A Hybrid Approach to Ontology Relationship Learning.- Automating the Generation of Semantic Annotation Tools Using a Clustering Technique.- Information Retrieval.- Exploiting Multiple Features with MEMMs for Focused Web Crawling.- Ranked-Listed or Categorized Results in IR: 2 Is Better Than 1.- Exploiting Morphological Query Structure Using Genetic Optimisation.- Generation of Query-Biased Concepts Using Content and Structure for Query Reformulation.- Comparing Several Textual Information Retrieval Systems for the Geographical Information Retrieval Task.- Querying and Question Answering.- Intensional Question Answering Using ILP: What Does an Answer Mean?.- Augmenting Data Retrieval with Information Retrieval Techniques by Using Word Similarity.- Combining Data Integration and IE Techniques to Support Partially Structured Data.- Towards Building Robust Natural Language Interfaces to Databases.- Towards a Bootstrapping NLIDB System.- Document Processing and Text Mining.- Real-Time News Event Extraction for Global Crisis Monitoring.- Topics Identification Based on Event Sequence Using Co-occurrence Words.- Topic Development Based Refinement of Audio-Segmented Television News.- Text Entailment for Logical Segmentation and Summarization.- Comparing Non-parametric Ensemble Methods for Document Clustering.- A Language Modelling Approach to Linking Criminal Styles with Offender Characteristics.- Software (Requirements) Engineering and Specification.- Towards Designing Operationalizable Models of Man-Machine Interaction Based on Concepts from Human Dialog Systems.- Using Linguistic Knowledge to Classify Non-functional Requirements in SRS documents.- A Preliminary Approach to the Automatic Extraction of Business Rules from Unrestricted Text in the Banking Industry.- Paraphrasing OCL Expressions with SBVR.- A General Architecture for Connecting NLP Frameworks and Desktop Clients Using Web Services.- Conceptual Modelling and Ontologies Related Posters.- Conceptual Model Generation from Requirements Model: A Natural Language Processing Approach.- Bivalent Verbs and Their Pragmatic Particularities.- Using Ontologies and Relatedness Metrics for Semantic Document Analysis on the Web.- Information Retrieval Related Posters.- The TSRM Approach in the Document Retrieval Application.- Enhanced Services for Targeted Information Retrieval by Event Extraction and Data Mining.- Querying and Question Answering Related Posters.- Improving Question Answering Tasks by Textual Entailment Recognition.- Supporting Named Entity Recognition and Syntactic Analysis with Full-Text Queries.- Document Processing and Text Mining Related Posters.- Multilingual Feature-Driven Opinion Extraction and Summarization from Customer Reviews.- Lexical and Semantic Methods in Inner Text Topic Segmentation: A Comparison between C99 and Transeg.- An Application of NLP and Audiovisual Content Analysis for Integration of Multimodal Databases of Current Events.- Detecting Protein-Protein Interaction Sentences Using a Mixture Model.- Using Semantic Features to Improve Task Identification in Email Messages.- Text Pre-processing for Document Clustering.- Software (Requirements) Engineering and Specification Related Posters.- Trade Oriented Enterprise Content Management: A Semantic and Collaborative Prototype Dedicated to the “Quality, Hygiene, Safety and Environment” Domain.- Doctoral Symposium Papers.- Mapping Natural Language into SQL in a NLIDB.- Improving Data Integration through Disambiguation Techniques.- An Ontology-Based Focused Crawler.- Impact of Term-Indexing for Arabic Document Retrieval.