COLING/ACL 2006 Nicoletta Calzolari – COLING/ACL 2006 General Chair COLING/ACL 2006 was the third joint conference of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics. The conference was held in Sydney, Australia, from 17-21 July 2006, with tutorials on July 16, workshops on July 22-23, and co-located events on July 15-16 and July 22-23. In this joint conference we tried to maintain the spirit of both COLING and ACL, but the combination had its own personality, in a mixture that was more than the simple sum of the two. Part of its character was due to the location, for the first time -- for both conferences -- in Australia. For this reason we decided to have a member of AFNLP (the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing) on the Advisory Board and to give particular attention and visibility to the Asia-Pacific context, communities and languages. We sincerely thank both the AFNLP-Nagao Fund for providing financial support for those presenting Asian NLP research, and ALTA (the Australasian Language Technology Association) for their local support. I profit of this report to express my gratitude again to all those without whom this conference would not have existed, and I think I can do that on behalf of all participants. My biggest thanks go to all the Chairs, for their invaluable effort and dedication which made this Conference possible. First of all the two Program Chairs: Claire Cardie and Pierre Isabelle, who did a tremendous job, managing so many submissions and taking care of both regular papers and posters, and the two Local Arrangements Chairs: Robert Dale and Cecile Paris, who succeeded in keeping so many details under control, in such a smooth way as if everything were natural and effortless for them. And all the others, for their precious, competent and hard work. I warmly thank the Advisory Board -- composed of four ICCL, four ACL, and one AFNLP members -- to whom we resorted for suggestions on important and sometimes delicate issues: Sandra Carberry, Eva Hajicova, Aravind Joshi, Martin Kay, Kathleen McCoy, Martha Palmer, Priscilla Rasmussen, Benjamin T'sou, Jun'ichi Tsujii. I express my gratitude to all the sponsors for their great support to the conference. I thank all the organizers of the so numerous surrounding workshops, tutorials, and other co-located events – conferences, workshops, summer school -- adding value to the main conference, creating altogether probably the biggest ever happening in Computational Linguistics. My thanks to the area chairs, the reviewers, the invited speakers, the authors of the various presentations, in particular the students who enter with enthusiasm in such an exciting field, all the participants who in many cases made a long trip to be present at COLING/ACL 2006, and all those who contributed in many ways to a success of the conference. And I finally thank both ICCL and ACL for having decided to join forces again in such a great enterprise. COLING/ACL 2006 was, I'm sure, an exciting, stimulating and inspiring event for all those who attended.