With an increasingly global economy and the explosive growth of the “World” in “World Wide Web”, the computational linguistics community is faced as never before with the challenges and opportunities of mulfi-linguality. At the same time, the community has returned with renewed enthusiasm to problems of word meaning, especially the delineation and discrimination of word senses. An intimate relationship between the two issues is becoming apparent - for example, in the consideration of translation equivalence in parallel corpora, the construction of mullilingual ontologies, and the examination of senses in relation to specific natural language applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, summarization, etc. The issue of multi-lingual approaches to sense distinctions was also a central topic of discussion at the first SENSEVAL conference in 1998, and is one of the areas to be covered at SENSEVAL-2 (to be held in Spring 2001).

This workshop addresses problems of word sense disambiguation and delineation of appropriate sense distinctions, with specific emphasis on approaches that involve more than one language and the ways in which observations about cross-linguistic equivalence affect our consideration of sense divisions in the individual languages. More generally, we seek to foster discussion and exchanges of insight in any area of computational linguistics where a non-monolingual approach to word sense issues is being taken.