This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Advances in Natural Language Processing, PolTAL 2014, Warsaw, Poland, in September 2014. The 27 revised full papers and 20 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on morphology, named entity recognition, term extraction; lexical semantics; sentence level syntax, semantics, and machine translation; discourse, coreference resolution, automatic summarization, and question answering; text classification, information extraction and information retrieval; and speech processing, language modelling, and spell- and grammar-checking.

'Coreference' presents specificities of reference, anaphora and coreference in Polish, establish identity-of-reference annotation model and present methodology used to create the corpus of Polish general nominal coreference. Various resolution approaches are presented, followed by their evaluation. By discussing the subsequent steps of building a coreference-related component of the natural language processing toolset and offering deeper explanation of the decisions taken, this volume might also serve as a reference book on state-of the art methods of carrying out coreference projects for new languages and a tutorial for NLP practitioners. Apart from serving as a description of the fi rst complete approach to annotation and resolution of direct nominal coreference for Polish, this book is a useful starting point for further work on other types of anaphora/coreference, semantic annotation, cognitive linguistics (related to the topic of near-identity, discussed in the book) etc. With extended tutorial-like sections on important subtopics, such as evaluation metrics for coreference resolution, it can prove useful to both researchers and practitioners interested in semantic description of Balto-Slavic languages and their processing, engineers developing language resources, tools and linguistic processing chains, as well as computational linguists in general.