LREC 2006 is the fifth edition of the the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Here is a brief overview of the previous editions, in terms of participation, main topics of interest and location.

-  LREC 98, the first LREC, was organised in Granada (Spain): 197 papers and posters were presented, with about 510 registered participants from 38 different countries from all continents. Among these, the largest group came from Spain (81 participants), followed by France (75), USA (73), Germany (47), UK (43) and Italy (41). Registered participants belonged to over 325 different organisations.
More information on this edition can be found on the LREC 98 web site.

-  LREC 2000, in Athens, had 129 oral papers and 152 posters presented, with around 600 participants from 51 different countries from all continents. Among these, the largest group came from Greece (117), followed by USA (70), France (59), Germany (45), UK (43), Japan (35) and Italy (29). Registered participants belonged to 319 different organisations.
More information on this edition can be found on the LREC 2000 web site.

-  LREC 2002, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), attracted over 700 representatives, coming from 38 countries around the world. The following figures illustrate how successful it proved to be: for the main conference, 460 papers had been submitted and reviewed, of which 365 were presented at the conference. Most of the areas in HLT were covered (about 280 papers dealt with written resources, about 100 with spoken resources, 25 with multimodal and multimedia resources, around 50 dealt with evaluation of HLT, and 16 with terminology).
More information on this edition can be found on the LREC 2002 web site.

-  LREC 2004, the 4th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference was held in memory of two dear friends and colleagues we lost in 2003, Angel Martin Municio and Antonio Zampolli. LREC 2004, which took place in Lisbon (Portugal), attracted almost 1000 participants, coming from 50 countries from all the continents. Close to 800 submissions for poster and oral presentations were reviewed by the Scientific Committee: 519 were actually presented, a majority dedicated to written resources (260), 116 dealt with spoken resources, 40 with terminological issues, 57 with evaluation, 17 were on general issues, and 29 on multimodal-multimedia ones. In addition, a total of 18 satellite workshops covering various fields were organised before and after the main conference.

A new award in HLT was launched on that occasion: the ELRA Board created a prize for “Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation”, to honour the memory of its co-founder and 1st president, Antonio Zampolli. The Antonio Zampolli Prize was awarded for the first time at LREC 2004 to Fredrick Jelinek, from John Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
More information on this edition can be found on the LREC 2004 web site.