Toulouse is the major city in Europe for aeronautics (about 70% of Airbus aircrafts are built there and 100% of the ATRs) and space (a number of satelites for the European shuttle are assembled here). Major companies are: Aerospatiale, Airbus Industry, ATR, MATRA, CNES. Toulouse also has a large number of computer software companies (CISI, General Electric, SYSECA, THOMSON, SIEMENS, etc.), a number of them involved in man-machine communication and speech processing (e.g. ELAN Informatique). Finally, two major national publishers are settled in Toulouse.
These companies, besides sponsoring a number of scientific meetings, also regularly have staff attending conferences organized locally. Computational Linguistics is, obviously, a topic of much interest to them, in particular for documentation production and translation, and for information retrieval.
We can therefore anticipate a strong interest and participation of these companies to ACL-EACL (see section on sponsors and annex).