CICLing2002wasthethirdannualConferenceonIntelligenttextprocessingand Computational Linguistics (hence the name CICLing); see www.CICLing.org. It was intended to provide a balanced view of the cutting edge developments in both theoretical foundations of computational linguistics and practice of natural language text processing with its numerous applications. A feature of CICLing conferences is their wide scope that covers nearly all areas of computational linguistics and all aspects of natural language processing applications. The c- ference is a forum for dialogue between the specialists working in these two areas. This year we were honored by the presence of our invited speakers Ni- lettaCalzolari (Inst. for Computational Linguistics, Italy), Ruslan Mitkov (U.of Wolverhampton, UK), Ivan Sag (Stanford U., USA), Yorick Wilks (U. of She?eld), and Antonio Zampolli (Inst. for Computational Linguistics, Italy). They delivered excellent extended lectures and organized vivid discussions. Of 67 submissions received, after careful reviewing 48 were selected for p- sentation; of them, 35 as full papers and 13 as short papers; by 98 authors from 19countries: Spain (18 authors), Mexico (13), Japan, UK (8each), Israel (7), Germany, Italy, USA (6each), Switzerland (5), Taiwan(4), Ireland (3), A- tralia, China, CzechRep., France, Russia (2each), Bulgaria, Poland, Romania (1 each).