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