Advances in Natural Language Processing : Third International Conference PorTAL 2002 Faro Portugal June 23–26 2002 Proceedings This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference PorTAL 2002 Portugal for Natural Language Processing held in Faro Portugal in June 2002. The 23 reviewed regular papers and 11 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pragmatics discourse semantics and the lexicon; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; language oriented information retrieval question answering summarization and information extraction; language oriented machine learning; multi lingual processing machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; tools and resources; and evaluation of systems