This book contains 11 papers on the computational extraction of lexical structure from textinput and text search: That is what is meant here by lexical acquisition. Theintroduction sets out the prospects for automatic lexical acquisition and is followed by threepapers on proper name identification and categorization. These offer different computationalsolutions to the quandaries proper names pose for delimitation, classification, standardization,and discourse reference. For example, where is the person in Federal Reserve ChairmanAlan Greenspan and how should this to be linked to Fed Chief? The advance inthese papers is their attempt to solve proper naming via text structure alone, which makes thesystems more savvy than brute look-up programs.