Lexical resources form a cornerstone of all natural language understanding systems. It has long been recognized, however, that creating lexicons manually is a time-consuming, laborious, and expensive undertaking. Moreover, such lexicons can never be complete, given the ever-changing content of the lexicon, especially across different domains. Finally, development of broad-coverage NL systems in many languages may be hindered by the lack of broad-coverage, machine-readable lexical resources in those languages.

We proposed this workshop as an opportunity for surveying the state of the art in the field, and for further stimulating discussion on the use of unsupervised, or minimally supervised, methods in the acquisition of lexical information. The papers in this volume attest to the broad appeal of these methods, as well as to the variety of tasks addressed, such as acquiring semantic, syntactic, and collocational information; learning translation lexicons; processing out-of-vocabulary words; and thesaurus extraction.