Yorick Wilks is a central figure in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. His influence extends to many areas and includes contributions to Machines Translation, word sense disambiguation, dialogue modeling and Information Extraction. This book celebrates the work of Yorick Wilks in the form of a selection of his papers which are intended to reflect the range and depth of his work. The volume accompanies a Festschrift which celebrates his contribution to the fields of Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. The papers include early work carried out at Cambridge University, descriptions of groundbreaking work on Machine Translation and Preference Semantics as well as more recent works on belief modeling and computational semantics. The selected papers reflect Yorick's contribution to both practical and theoretical aspects of automatic language processing. This book forms a two-part set together with Words and Intelligence II: Essays in Honor of Yorick Wilks, a collection of original contributions from eminent scientists, by the same editors.