Welcome to NLDB04, the Ninth International Conference on the Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, held at the University of Salford, UK d- ing June 23-25, 2004. NLDB04 follows on the success of previous conferences held since 1995. Early conferences then known as Application of Natural Language to Databases, hence the acronym NLDB, were used as a forum to discuss and disse- nate research on the integration of natural language and databases and were mainly concerned with natural language based queries, database modelling and user int- faces that facilitate access to information. The conference has since moved to enc- pass all aspects of Information Systems and Software Engineering. Indeed, the use of natural language in systems modelling has greatly improved the development process and benefited both developers and users at all stages of the software development process. The latest developments in the field of natural language and the emergence of new technologies has seen a shift towards storage of large semantic electronic dictionaries, their exploitation and the advent of what is now known as the semantic web. Inf- mation extraction and retrieval, document and content management, ontology dev- opment and management and natural language conversational systems are becoming regular tracks in the last NLDB conferences. NLDB04 has seen a 50% increase in the number of submissions and has est- lished itself as one of the leading conferences in the area of applying natural language to information systems in its broader sense.