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 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 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.

In Methods in Latin Computational Linguistics, Barbara McGillivray presents some of the most significant methodological foundations of the emerging field of Latin Computational Linguistics. The reader will find an overview of the computational resources and tools available for Latin and three corpus case studies covering morpho-syntactic and lexical-semantic aspects of Latin verb valency, as well as quantitative diachronic explorations of the argument realization of Latin prefixed verbs. The computational models and the multivariate data analysis techniques employed are explained with a detailed but accessible language. Barbara McGillivray convincingly shows the challenges and opportunities of combining computational methods and historical language data, and contributes to driving the technological change that is affecting Historical Linguistics and the Humanities.

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 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.

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.

This textbook approaches second language acquisition from the perspective of generative linguistics. Roumyana Slabakova reviews and discusses paradigms and findings from the last thirty years of research in the field, focussing in particular on how the second or additional language is represented in the mind and how it is used in communication. The adoption and analysis of a specific model of acquisition, the Bottleneck Hypothesis, provides a unifying perspective. The book assumes some non-technical knowledge of linguistics, but important concepts are clearly introduced and defined throughout, making it a valuable resource not only for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, but also for researchers in cognitive science and language teachers.

These two volumes consisting of Foundations and Applications provide the current status of theoretical and empirical developments in "computing with words." In philosophy, the twentieth century is said to be the century of language. This is mainly due to Wittgenstein who said: "The meaning of a word is its use in the language game." "The concept game is a concept with blurred edges." In the first phrase, "the language game" implies the everyday human activity with language, and in the latter, "game" simply implies an ordinary word. Thus, Wittgenstein precisely stated that a word is fuzzy in real life. Unfortunately this idea about a word was not accepted in the conventional science. We had to wait for Zadeh's fuzzy sets theory. Remembering Wittgenstein's statement, we should consider, on the one hand, the concept of "computing with words" from a philosophical point of view. It deeply relates to the everyday use of a word in which the meaning of a word is fuzzy in its nature.

This book provides an overview of how comparable corpora can be used to overcome the lack of parallel resources when building machine translation systems for under-resourced languages and domains. It presents a wealth of methods and open tools for building comparable corpora from the Web, evaluating comparability and extracting parallel data that can be used for the machine translation task. It is divided into several sections, each covering a specific task such as building, processing, and using comparable corpora, focusing particularly on under-resourced language pairs and domains. The book is intended for anyone interested in data-driven machine translation for under-resourced languages and domains, especially for developers of machine translation systems, computational linguists and language workers. It offers a valuable resource for specialists and students in natural language processing, machine translation, corpus linguistics and computer-assisted translation, and promotes the broader use of comparable corpora in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

The Lexicon provides an introduction to the study of words, their main properties, and how we use them to create meaning. It offers a detailed description of the organizing principles of the lexicon, and of the categories used to classify a wide range of lexical phenomena, including polysemy, meaning variation in composition, and the interplay with ontology, syntax, and pragmatics. Elisabetta Jezek uses empirical data from digitalized corpora and speakers' judgements, combined with the formalisms developed in the field of general and theoretical linguistics, to propose representations for each of these phenomena. The key feature of the book is that it merges theoretical accounts with lexicographic approaches and computational insights. Its clear structure and accessible approach make The Lexicon an ideal textbook for all students of linguistics-theoretical, applied, and computational-and a valuable resource for scholars and students of language in the fields of cognitive science and philosophy.

Parsing technology is concerned with finding syntactic structure in language. In parsing we have to deal with incomplete and not necessarily accurate formal descriptions of natural languages. Robustness and efficiency are among the main issuesin parsing. Corpora can be used to obtain frequency information about language use. This allows probabilistic parsing, an approach that aims at both robustness and efficiency increase. Approximation techniques, to be applied at the level of language description, parsing strategy, and syntactic representation, have the same objective. Approximation at the level of syntactic representation is also known as underspecification, a traditional technique to deal with syntactic ambiguity. In this book new parsing technologies are collected that aim at attacking the problems of robustness and efficiency by exactly these techniques: the design of probabilistic grammars and efficient probabilistic parsing algorithms, approximation techniques applied to grammars and parsers to increase parsing efficiency, and techniques for underspecification and the integration of semantic information in the syntactic analysis to deal with massive ambiguity. The book gives a state-of-the-art overview of current research and development in parsing technologies. In its chapters we see how probabilistic methods have entered the toolbox of computational linguistics in order to be applied in both parsing theory and parsing practice. The book is both a unique reference for researchers and an introduction to the field for interested graduate students.

These two volumes consIstmg of Foundations and Applications provide the current status of theoretical and empirical developments in "computing with words." In philosophy, the twentieth century is said to be the century of language. This is mainly due to Wittgenstein who said: "The meaning of a word is its use in the language game." "The concept game is a concept with blurred edges." In the first phrase, "the language game" implies the everyday human activity with language, and in the latter, "game" simply implies an ordinary word. Thus, Wittgenstein precisely stated that a word is fuzzy in real life. Unfortunately this idea about a word was not accepted in the conventional science. We had to wait for Zadeh's fuzzy sets theory. Remembering Wittgenstein's statement, we should consider, on the one hand, the concept of "computing with words" from a philosophical point of view. It deeply relates to the everyday use of a word in which the meaning of a word is fuzzy in its nature.

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.

This book sheds new light on corpus-assisted translation pedagogy, an intersection of three distinct but cognate disciplines: corpus linguistics, translation and pedagogy. By taking an innovative and empirical approach to translation teaching, the study utilizes mixed methods, including translation experiments, surveys and in-depth focus groups. The results demonstrated the unique advantages and at the same time called attention to possible pitfalls of using corpora for translation teaching purposes. This book enriches our understanding of corpus application in the setting of translation between Chinese and English, two languages which are each distinctly different from one another. Readers will also discover new horizons in this burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of research. This book appeals to a broad readership, from scholars and researchers who are interested in translation technology to widen the scope of translation studies, translation trainers in search of effective teaching approaches to a growing number of cross-disciplinary postgraduate students longing to improve their translation skills and competence.

This book covers theoretical work, applications, approaches, and techniques for computational models of information and its presentation by language (artificial, human, or natural in other ways). Computational and technological developments that incorporate natural language are proliferating. Adequate coverage encounters difficult problems related to ambiguities and dependency on context and agents (humans or computational systems). The goal is to promote computational systems of intelligent natural language processing and related models of computation, language, thought, mental states, reasoning, and other cognitive processes.

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.

This book explores some of the ethical, legal, and social implications of chatbots, or conversational artificial agents. It reviews the possibility of establishing meaningful social relationships with chatbots and investigates the consequences of those relationships for contemporary debates in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. The author introduces current technological challenges of AI and discusses how technological progress and social change influence our understanding of social relationships. He then argues that chatbots introduce epistemic uncertainty into human social discourse, but that this can be ameliorated by introducing a new ontological classification or 'status' for chatbots. This step forward would allow humans to reap the benefits of this technological development, without the attendant losses. Finally, the author considers the consequences of chatbots on human-human relationships, providing analysis on robot rights, human-centered design, and the social tension between robophobes and robophiles.

In this book John A. Hawkins argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural options from which selections are made in performance, e.g. between competing word orders and between relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun versus a gap. The preferences and patterns of performance within languages are reflected, he shows, in the fixed conventions and variation patterns across grammars, leading to a 'Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis'. Hawkins extends and updates the general theory that he laid out in Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars (OUP 2004): new areas of grammar and performance are discussed, new research findings are incorporated that test his earlier predictions, and new advances in the contributing fields of language processing, linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and typology are addressed. This efficiency approach to variation has far-reaching theoretical consequences relevant to many current issues in the language sciences. These include the notion of ease of processing and how to measure it, the role of processing in language change, the nature of language universals and their explanation, the theory of complexity, the relative strength of competing and cooperating principles, and the proper definition of fundamental grammatical notions such as 'dependency'. The book also offers a new typology of VO and OV languages and their correlating properties seen from this perspective, and a new typology of the noun phrase and of argument structure.

This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one would guess, making them a real nightmare for natural language processing applications. The second part introduces a new generic framework for automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from texts. Furthermore, it describes the accompanying free software tool, the mwetoolkit, which comes in handy when looking for expressions in texts (regardless of the language). Evaluation is greatly emphasized, underlining the fact that results depend on parameters like corpus size, language, MWE type, etc. The last part contains solid experimental results and evaluates the mwetoolkit, demonstrating its usefulness for computer-assisted lexicography and machine translation. This is the first book to cover the whole pipeline of multiword expression acquisition in a single volume. It is addresses the needs of students and researchers in computational and theoretical linguistics, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and computer science. Its good balance between computational and linguistic views make it the perfect starting point for anyone interested in multiword expressions, language and text processing in general.

When viewed through a political lens, the act of defining terms in natural language arguably transforms knowledge into values. This unique volume explores how corporate, military, academic, and professional values shaped efforts to define computer terminology and establish an information engineering profession as a precursor to what would become computer science. As the Cold War heated up, U.S. federal agencies increasingly funded university researchers and labs to develop technologies, like the computer, that would ensure that the U.S. maintained economic prosperity and military dominance over the Soviet Union. At the same time, private corporations saw opportunities for partnering with university labs and military agencies to generate profits as they strengthened their business positions in civilian sectors. They needed a common vocabulary and principles of streamlined communication to underpin the technology development that would ensure national prosperity and military dominance. investigates how language standardization contributed to the professionalization of computer science as separate from mathematics, electrical engineering, and physics examines traditions of language standardization in earlier eras of rapid technology development around electricity and radio highlights the importance of the analogy of "the computer is like a human" to early explanations of computer design and logic traces design and development of electronic computers within political and economic contexts foregrounds the importance of human relationships in decisions about computer design This in-depth humanistic study argues for the importance of natural language in shaping what people come to think of as possible and impossible relationships between computers and humans. The work is a key reference in the history of technology and serves as a source textbook on the human-level history of computing. In addition, it addresses those with interests in sociolinguistic questions around technology studies, as well as technology development at the nexus of politics, business, and human relations.

This book is an account of the rise of definite and indefinite articles in Danish, Swedish and Icelandic, as documented in a choice of extant texts from 1200-1550. These three North Germanic languages show different development patterns in the rise of articles, despite the common origin, but each reveals interdependencies between the two processes. The matter is approached from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The statistical analysis provides an improved overview on article grammaticalization, focusing on the factors at the basis of such process. The in-depth qualitative analysis of longer text passages places the crucial stage of the definite article grammaticalization with the so-called indirect anaphoric reference.

This book provides a timely and comprehensive overview of current theories and methods in fuzzy logic, as well as relevant applications in a variety of fields of science and technology. Dedicated to Lotfi A. Zadeh on his one year death anniversary, the book goes beyond a pure commemorative text. Yet, it offers a fresh perspective on a number of relevant topics, such as computing with words, theory of perceptions, possibility theory, and decision-making in a fuzzy environment. Written by Zadeh's closest colleagues and friends, the different chapters are intended both as a timely reference guide and a source of inspiration for scientists, developers and researchers who have been dealing with fuzzy sets or would like to learn more about their potential for their future research.