Introduction to the special issue on computational linguistics using large corpora, Kenneth W. Church and Robert L. Mercer generalized probabilistic LR parsing of natural language (corpora) with unification-based grammars, Ted Briscoe and John Carroll accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence, Ted Dunning a program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora, William A. Gale and Kenneth W. Church structural ambiguity and lexical relations, Donald Hindle and Mats Rooth text-translation alignment, Martin Kay and Martin Roescheisen retrieving collocations from text - Xtract, Frank Smadja using register-diversified corpora for general language studies, Douglas Biber from grammar to lexicon - unsupervised learning of lexical syntax, Michael R. Brent the mathematics of statistical machine translation - parameter estimation, Peter F. Brown et al building a large annotated corpus of English - the Penn treebank, Mitchell P. Marcus et al lexical semantic techniques for corpus analysis, James Pustejovsky et al coping with ambiguity and unknown words through probabilistic models, Ralph Weischedel et al.