The Conference is the 32nd in an annual series. The first Conference (Colloque européen sur le lexique et la grammaire comparés des langues romanes) was organised by Alain Guillet and Nunzio La Fauci in Palermo in September 1981. In parallel with these Conferences, European (and later non-European) research teams have been constructing large-scale linguistic knowledge bases and corpora. Over the years, it has become progressively clear that these resources could usefully support computer applications for the processing of written text.