ACL

These are the proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. They contain both the papers contributed to the annual conference and the position papers from the participants in the special parasession on Topics in Interactive Discourse. This year s conference features a session on improving the robustness of natural language understanding systems. Also noteworthy is the mixture of applied and theoretical studies, and the number of subdisciplines that have contributed to the meeting. The parasession addresses specific issues in interactive systems. Individual panels look at the influence of th~ social and task contexts. One panel considers future prospects.