This volume brings together a selection of papers presented at the 1997 Second International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP `97). The aim was to give researchers the opportunity to present new results in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

1. Editors' Foreword; 2. I. Tagging; 3. Extending N-gram tagging to word graphs (by Samuelsson, Christer); 4. Can we improve part-of-speech tagging by inducing probabilistic part-of-speech annotated lexicons from large corpora? (by Smith, Nicholas); 5. Automatically acquiring a language model for POS tagging using decision trees (by Marquez, Lluis); 6. II. Lexical issues & parsing; 7. Designing a dictionary of derived nominals (by MacLeod, Catherine); 8. Partial evaluation for efficient access to inheritance lexicons (by Hartrumpf, Sven); 9. Lexicon filtering (by Segond, Frederique); 10. Generalized LR parsing for extensions of context-free grammars (by Alonso Pardo, Miguel A.); 11. Statistical ambiguity resolution for grammar-based parsing (by Berthouzoz, Cathy); 12. Using the TOPSIS multicriteria method to direct an agreement error correction process: An application to Arabic (by Belguith, Lamia Hadrich); 13. III. Disambiguation & anaphora resolution; 14. Combining independent knowledge sources for word sense disambiguation (by Wilks, Yorick); 15. Toward full-text ontology-based word sense disambiguation (by Mahesh, Kavi); 16. Robust reference resolution with limited knowledge: High precision genre-specific approach for English and Polish (by Mitkov, Ruslan); 17. Slot unification grammar & anaphora resolution (by Ferrandez, Antonio); 18. Subject ellipsis in Chinese news headlines (by Chin, Andy Chi-on); 19. IV. Semantics; 20. A discourse-semantic account of topic and comment (by Seuren, Pieter A.M.); 21. Compact representation of ambiguous language (by Eberle, Kurt); 22. Lexical ambiguity in machine translation: Using Frame Semantics for expressing regularities in polysemy (by Sandford Pedersen, Bolette); 23. V. Generation; 24. PROTECTOR: Efficient generation with lexicalized grammars (by Nicolov, Nicolas); 25. Aggregative utterance planning for interactive instruction (by Kato, Tsuneaki); 26. AMALIA: A unified platform for parsing and generation (by Wintner, Shuly); 27. Information structure and machine translation: Generating Danish existential sentences (by Paggio, Patrizia); 28. VI. Machine translation; 29. Using hybrid methods and resources in semantic-based transfer (by Buschbeck-Wolf, Bianka); 30. Inflectional information in transfer for lexicalist machine translation (by Turcato, Davide); 31. Machine translation with Episteme: Linguistic knowledge representation, computational efficiency and formal properties (by Amores, J. Gabriel); 32. Combining multiple methods for the automatic construction of multilingual WordNets (by Atserias, Jordi); 33. VII. Categorisation & applications; 34. Probabilistic event categorisation (by Wiebe, Janyce M.); 35. Using WordNet to complement training information in text categorisation (by de Buenaga Rodriguez, Manuel); 36. Term weight learning for an automatic text categorisation (by Fukumoto, Fumiyo); 37. Linguistic engineering using ALEP (by Bredenkamp, Andrew); 38. The effect of increased context on information retrieval effectiveness (by Chandrasekar, Raman); 39. MILK: A hybrid system for multilingual indexing and information extraction (by Bolioli, A.); 40. List and Addresses of Contributors; 41. Index of Subjects and Terms