This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference PorTAL 2002 - Portugal for Natural Language Processing, held in Faro, Portugal, in June 2002. The 23 reviewed regular papers and 11 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pragmatics, discourse, semantics, and the lexicon; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; language-oriented information retrieval, question answering, summarization, and information extraction; language-oriented machine learning; multi-lingual processing, machine translation, and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; tools and resources; and evaluation of systems.