Welcome to NLDB 2004, the 9th International Conference on the Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, held at the University of Salford, UK during June 23-25, 2004. NLDB 2004 followed 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 disseminate research on the integration of natural language and databases and were mainly concerned with natural-language-based queries, database modeling and user interfaces that facilitate access to information. The conference has since moved to encompass all aspects of information systems and software engineering. Indeed, the use of natural language in systems modeling has greatly improved the development process and benefited both developers and users at all stages of the software development process.