This book offers a timely report on key theories and applications of soft-computing. Written in honour of Professor Gaspar Mayor on his 70th birthday, it primarily focuses on areas related to his research, including fuzzy binary operators, aggregation functions, multi-distances, and fuzzy consensus/decision models. It also discusses a number of interesting applications such as the implementation of fuzzy mathematical morphology based on Mayor-Torrens t-norms. Importantly, the different chapters, authored by leading experts, present novel results and offer new perspectives on different aspects of Mayor's research. The book also includes an overview of evolutionary fuzzy systems, a topic that is not one of Mayor's main areas of interest, and a final chapter written by the Spanish pioneer in fuzzy logic, Professor E. Trillas. Computer and decision scientists, knowledge engineers and mathematicians alike will find here an authoritative overview of key soft-computing concepts and techniques.

The general markup language XML has played an outstanding role in the mul- ple ways of processing electronic documents, XML being used either in the design of interface structures or as a formal framework for the representation of structure or content-related properties of documents. This book in its 13 chapters discusses aspects of XML-based linguistic information modeling combining: methodological issues, especially with respect to text-related information modeling, applicati- oriented research and issues of formal foundations. The contributions in this book are based on current research in Text Technology, Computational Linguistics and in the international domain of evolving standards for language resources. Rec- rent themes in this book are markup languages, explored from different points of view, and topics of text-related information modeling. These topics have been core areas of the research Unit "Text-technological Information Modeling" (www. te- technology. de) funded from 2002 to 2009 by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Positions developed in this book could also bene t from the presentations and discussion at the conference "Modelling Linguistic Information Resources" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Zentrum fur .. interdisziplinare .. Forschung, ZiF) at Bielefeld, a center for advanced studies known for its international and interdisciplinary meetings and research. The editors would like to thank the DFG and ZiF for their nancial support, the publisher, the series editors, the reviewers and those people that helped to prepare the manuscript, especially Carolin Kram, Nils Diewald, Jens Stegmann and Peter M. Fischer and last but not least, all of the authors.

Being presented with phrases of the kind, 'take the plunge' and 'write a letter', native speakers of English tend to agree that the former is more idiomatic that the latter. What exactly is it about these two phrases that guide speakers' judgements? Adopting a usage-based perspective, this study addresses the question 'which factors do speakers rely upon when assessing the idiomaticity of a construction?'.
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Rethinking Idiomaticity "is the first study to bring together a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach and quantitative judgement data to explore the nature of idiomaticity as a complex concept that comprises semantic and formal variation parameters. Wulff's fascinating book is suitable for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of lexicography, phraseology, corpus linguistics and those who are employing quantitative approaches.
Cognitive linguists interested in the empirical underpinnings of their theoretical assumptions will also find this required reading.

Serious work using computers to support language teaching and learning began in the 1960s, but it was not until the beginning of the 1980s when microcomputers began to proliferate that groups of practitioners began forming professional groups and a formal identification of the field occurred. Although the early promise of computer-assisted language learning (or ?CALL?), to revolutionize second-language learning has not been met, the past quarter century has seen a fascinating range of growth. This is not only because of lessons learned from research and practice, but also due to the rapid and continuing shifts in the technology itself.

Nominally a branch of applied linguistics, 'CALL' is truly interdisciplinary, drawing its core concepts not only from linguistics, but also from computer science, speech engineering, psychology, sociology, second-language acquisition, and general education.

This new four-volume title from Routledge will allow 'CALL' practitioners, researchers, and students to easily access the best and most influential foundational and cutting-edge scholarship. The is also a comprehensive introduction to critical concepts in 'CALL' for applied linguists and language educators interested in the growing role of technology in second-language acquisition.

In this book, a novel approach that combines speech-based emotion recognition with adaptive human-computer dialogue modeling is described. With the robust recognition of emotions from speech signals as their goal, the authors analyze the effectiveness of using a plain emotion recognizer, a speech-emotion recognizer combining speech and emotion recognition, and multiple speech-emotion recognizers at the same time. The semi-stochastic dialogue model employed relates user emotion management to the corresponding dialogue interaction history and allows the device to adapt itself to the context, including altering the stylistic realization of its speech. This comprehensive volume begins by introducing spoken language dialogue systems and providing an overview of human emotions, theories, categorization and emotional speech. It moves on to cover the adaptive semi-stochastic dialogue model and the basic concepts of speech-emotion recognition. Finally, the authors show how speech-emotion recognizers can be optimized, and how an adaptive dialogue manager can be implemented. The book, with its novel methods to perform robust speech-based emotion recognition at low complexity, will be of interest to a variety of readers involved in human-computer interaction.

Yorick Wilks is a central figure in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. His influence extends to many areas of these fields and includes contributions to machine translation, word sense disambiguation, dialogue modeling and information extraction.This book celebrates the work of Yorick Wilks from the perspective of his peers. It consists of original chapters each of which analyses an aspect of his work and links it to current thinking in that area. His work has spanned over four decades but is shown to be pertinent to recent developments in language processing such as the Semantic Web.This volume forms a two-part set together with 'Words and Intelligence I, Selected Works by Yorick Wilks', by the same editors.

Qualitative reasoning about space and time - a reasoning at the human level - promises to become a fundamental aspect of future systems that will accompany us in daily activity. The aim of Spatial and Temporal Reasoning is to give a picture of current research in this area focusing on both representational and computational issues. The picture emphasizes some major lines of development in this multifaceted, constantly growing area. The material in the book also shows some common ground and a novel combination of spatial and temporal aspects of qualitative reasoning. Part I presents the overall scene. The chapter by Laure Vieu is on the state of the art in spatial representation and reasoning, and that by Alfonso Gerevini gives a similar survey on research in temporal reasoning. The specific contributions to these areas are then grouped in the two main parts. In Part II, Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi examine the ontological status of spatial entities; Anthony Cohn, Brandon Bennett, John Gooday, and Nicholas Gotts present a detailed theory of reasoning with qualitative relations about regions; Andrew Frank discusses the spatial needs of geographical information systems; and Annette Herskovits focuses on the linguistic expression of spatial relations. In Part III, James Allen and George Ferguson describe an interval temporal logic for the representation of actions and events; Drew McDermott presents an efficient way of predicting the outcome of plan execution; and Erik Sandewall introduces a semantics based on transitions for assessing theories of action and change. In Part IV, Antony Galton's chapter stands clearly between the two areas of space and time and outlines the main coordinates of an integrated approach.

Fuzzy modeling usually comes with two contradictory requirements: interpretability, which is the capability to express the real system behavior in a comprehensible way, and accuracy, which is the capability to faithfully represent the real system. In this framework, one of the most important areas is linguistic fuzzy modeling, where the legibility of the obtained model is the main objective. This task is usually developed by means of linguistic (Mamdani) fuzzy rule-based systems. An active research area is oriented towards the use of new techniques and structures to extend the classical, rigid linguistic fuzzy modeling with the main aim of increasing its precision degree. Traditionally, this accuracy improvement has been carried out without considering the corresponding interpretability loss. Currently, new trends have been proposed trying to preserve the linguistic fuzzy model description power during the optimization process. Written by leading experts in the field, this volume collects some representative researcher that pursue this approach.

This book assesses the place of logic, mathematics, and computer science in present day, interdisciplinary areas of computational linguistics. Computational linguistics studies natural language in its various manifestations from a computational point of view, both on the theoretical level (modeling grammar modules dealing with natural language form and meaning and the relation between these two) and on the practical level (developing applications for language and speech technology). It is a collection of chapters presenting new and future research. The book focuses mainly on logical approaches to computational processing of natural language and on the applicability of methods and techniques from the study of formal languages, programming, and other specification languages. It presents work from other approaches to linguistics, as well, especially because they inspire new work and approaches.

This is the first book which brings together the fields of theoretical and empirical studies in syntax on the one hand and the methodology of quantitative linguistics on the other hand. The author provides the theoretical background for this enterprise on the basis of the philosophy of science and of linguistic considerations including a discussion of Chomsky's attitude against the application of statistical methods to syntactic phenomena. He gives a short introduction into the aims and methods of the quantitative approach to linguistics in general and to syntax in particular. The following chapters inform the reader about the measurement of syntactic properties, possibilities to acquire empirical data from syntactically annotated text corpora and the most common mathematical models and methods for the analysis of syntactic and syntagmatic material. Then, a number of prominent approaches and hypotheses about interrelations between properties of syntactic constructions are presented and evaluated on material from various languages and text kinds. Finally, the theory of synergetic linguistics and its application to syntax is introduced including the integration of such famous hypotheses as Yngve's depth hypothesis and Hawkins's "Early immediate constituent" principle. The book concludes with a number of perspectives with respect to follow-up studies and extensions to the presented models with interfaces to neighbouring disciplines.

This book presents the first computer program, called KINSHIP, automating the task of componential analysis of kinship vocabularies. KINSHIP accepts as input the kin terms of a language with their attendant kin types and can produce all alternative componential models of a kinship system, including the most parsimonious one, using the minimum number of dimensions and components in a kin term definition. A further simplicity constraint ensures the coordination between kin term definitions. Inspecting previous practices of the method of componential analysis reveals two basic problems in published models: (1) the commonly occurring inconsistency of componential models (violating necessity or sufficiency conditions of kin term definitions), (2) the huge number of alternative componential models. The application of KINSHIP with its simplicity constraints successfully solves both these problems. The utility of the program is illustrated on complete data sets from more than a dozen languages from Indo-European and non-Indo-European origin.

This work combines interdisciplinary knowledge and experience from research fields of psychology, linguistics, audio-processing, machine learning, and computer science. The work systematically explores a novel research topic devoted to automated modeling of personality expression from speech. For this aim, it introduces a novel personality assessment questionnaire and presents the results of extensive labeling sessions to annotate the speech data with personality assessments. It provides estimates of the Big 5 personality traits, i.e. openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Based on a database built on the questionnaire, the book presents models to tell apart different personality types or classes from speech automatically.

"Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions" presents the discussion of the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new study findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a subfield in sociology/sociolinguistics, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding. Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation natural language technologies for practical speech processing applications that serve the consumer's need for well-functioning natural language-driven personal assistants and other mobile devices, while also addressing business' need for better functioning IVR-driven call centers that yield a more satisfying experience for the caller. This anthology is aimed at two distinct audiences: one consisting of speech engineers and system developers; the other comprised of linguists and cognitive scientists. The text builds on the experience and knowledge of each of these audiences by exposing them to the work of the other.

*The most comprehensive up-to-date student-friendly guide to translation tools and technologies *Translation Tools and Technologies are an essential component of any translator training programme, following European Masters in Translation framework guidelines *Unlike the competition, this textbook offers comprehensive and accessible explanations of how to use current translation tools, illustrated by examples using a wide range of languages, linked to task-oriented, self-study training materials

In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.

This volume provides an overview of the field of Hybrid Machine Translation (MT) and presents some of the latest research conducted by linguists and practitioners from different multidisciplinary areas. Nowadays, most important developments in MT are achieved by combining data-driven and rule-based techniques. These combinations typically involve hybridization of different traditional paradigms, such as the introduction of linguistic knowledge into statistical approaches to MT, the incorporation of data-driven components into rule-based approaches, or statistical and rule-based pre- and post-processing for both types of MT architectures. The book is of interest primarily to MT specialists, but also - in the wider fields of Computational Linguistics, Machine Learning and Data Mining - to translators and managers of translation companies and departments who are interested in recent developments concerning automated translation tools.

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its reliability to selectively focus on those segments and features that are most reliable for recognition. This book presents the state of the art in recognition in the presence of uncertainty, offering examples that utilize uncertainty information for noise robustness, reverberation robustness, simultaneous recognition of multiple speech signals, and audiovisual speech recognition. The book is appropriate for scientists and researchers in the field of speech recognition who will find an overview of the state of the art in robust speech recognition, professionals working in speech recognition who will find strategies for improving recognition results in various conditions of mismatch, and lecturers of advanced courses on speech processing or speech recognition who will find a reference and a comprehensive introduction to the field. The book assumes an understanding of the fundamentals of speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources - the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

This book furthers the historical and technical debate by looking at reasoning as the action of language when it is devoted to explaining or foretelling, based on the authors' centennial combined experience in fuzzy logic. A simple logical model mixing abductions and deductions is introduced in order to attain speculations, conjectures that may be responsible for induction, and creativity in reasoning. A central point and a dire hypothesis of the book are that such process can be implemented by computation and as such can lead to a new approach to automatic thinking and reasoning. On top of the technical approach, the relationship between reasoning and thinking is also analyzed trying to establish links with notions and concepts of thinkers from the European Middle Age to the current days. This book is recommended to young researchers that are interested in either the scientific or philosophical aspects of computational thinking, and can further the debate between the two approaches.

"A Journey Through Cultures" addresses one of the hottest topics in contemporary HCI: cultural diversity amongst users. For a number of years the HCI community has been investigating alternatives to enhance the design of cross-cultural systems. Most contributions to date have followed either a 'design for each' or a 'design for all' strategy.

"A Journey Through Cultures "takes a very different approach. Proponents of CVM - the Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors perspective - the authors invite HCI practitioners to think of how to expose and communicate the idea of cultural diversity. A detailed case study is included which assesses the metaphors' potential in cross-cultural design and evaluation. The results show that cultural viewpoint metaphors have strong epistemic power, leveraged by a combination of theoretic foundations coming from Anthropology, Semiotics and the authors' own work in HCI and Semiotic Engineering.

Luciana Salgado, Carla Leitao and Clarisse de Souza are members of SERG, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group at the Departamento de Informatica of Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio)."

This book lays out a path leading from the linguistic and cognitive basics, to classical rule-based and machine learning algorithms, to today's state-of-the-art approaches, which use advanced empirically grounded techniques, automatic knowledge acquisition, and refined linguistic modeling to make a real difference in real-world applications. Anaphora and coreference resolution both refer to the process of linking textual phrases (and, consequently, the information attached to them) within as well as across sentence boundaries, and to the same discourse referent. The book offers an overview of recent research advances, focusing on practical, operational approaches and their applications. In part I (Background), it provides a general introduction, which succinctly summarizes the linguistic, cognitive, and computational foundations of anaphora processing and the key classical rule- and machine-learning-based anaphora resolution algorithms. Acknowledging the central importance of shared resources, part II (Resources) covers annotated corpora, formal evaluation, preprocessing technology, and off-the-shelf anaphora resolution systems. Part III (Algorithms) provides a thorough description of state-of-the-art anaphora resolution algorithms, covering enhanced machine learning methods as well as techniques for accomplishing important subtasks such as mention detection and acquisition of relevant knowledge. Part IV (Applications) deals with a selection of important anaphora and coreference resolution applications, discussing particular scenarios in diverse domains and distilling a best-practice model for systematically approaching new application cases. In the concluding part V (Outlook), based on a survey conducted among the contributing authors, the prospects of the research field of anaphora processing are discussed, and promising new areas of interdisciplinary cooperation and emerging application scenarios are identified. Given the book's design, it can be used both as an accompanying text for advanced lectures in computational linguistics, natural language engineering, and computer science, and as a reference work for research and independent study. It addresses an audience that includes academic researchers, university lecturers, postgraduate students, advanced undergraduate students, industrial researchers, and software engineers.

This open access book provides an in-depth description of the EU project European Language Grid (ELG). Its motivation lies in the fact that Europe is a multilingual society with 24 official European Union Member State languages and dozens of additional languages including regional and minority languages. The only meaningful way to enable multilingualism and to benefit from this rich linguistic heritage is through Language Technologies (LT) including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Speech Technologies and language-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The European Language Grid provides a single umbrella platform for the European LT community, including research and industry, effectively functioning as a virtual home, marketplace, showroom, and deployment centre for all services, tools, resources, products and organisations active in the field. Today the ELG cloud platform already offers access to more than 13,000 language processing tools and language resources. It enables all stakeholders to deposit, upload and deploy their technologies and datasets. The platform also supports the long-term objective of establishing digital language equality in Europe by 2030 - to create a situation in which all European languages enjoy equal technological support. This is the very first book dedicated to Language Technology and NLP platforms. Cloud technology has only recently matured enough to make the development of a platform like ELG feasible on a larger scale. The book comprehensively describes the results of the ELG project. Following an introduction, the content is divided into four main parts: (I) ELG Cloud Platform; (II) ELG Inventory of Technologies and Resources; (III) ELG Community and Initiative; and (IV) ELG Open Calls and Pilot Projects.

In its nine chapters, this book provides an overview of the state-of-the-art and best practice in several sub-fields of evaluation of text and speech systems and components. The evaluation aspects covered include speech and speaker recognition, speech synthesis, animated talking agents, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and natural language software like machine translation, information retrieval, question answering, spoken dialogue systems, data resources, and annotation schemes. With its broad coverage and original contributions this book is unique in the field of evaluation of speech and language technology.

This book is of particular relevance to advanced undergraduate students, PhD students, academic and industrial researchers, and practitioners.

The idea that the expression of radical beliefs is a predictor to future acts of political violence has been a central tenet of counter-extremism over the last two decades. Not only has this imposed a duty upon doctors, lecturers and teachers to inform on the radical beliefs of their patients and students but, as this book argues, it is also a fundamentally flawed concept. Informed by his own experience with the UK's Prevent programme while teaching in a Muslim community, Rob Faure Walker explores the linguistic emergence of 'extremism' in political discourse and the potentially damaging generative effect of this language. Taking a new approach which combines critical discourse analysis with critical realism, this book shows how the fear of being labelled as an 'extremist' has resulted in counter-terrorism strategies which actually undermine moderating mechanisms in a democracy. Analysing the generative mechanisms by which the language of counter-extremism might actually promote violence, Faure Walker explains how understanding the potentially oppressive properties of language can help us transcend them. The result is an imminent critique of the most pernicious aspects of the global War on Terror, those that are embedded in our everyday language and political discourse. Drawing on the author's own successful lobbying activities against counter-extremism, this book presents a model for how discourse analysis and critical realism can and should engage with the political and how this will affect meaningful change.