This book is at the very heart of linguistics. It provides the theoretical and methodological framework needed to create a successful linguistic project. Potential applications of descriptive linguistics include spell-checkers, intelligent search engines, information extractors and annotators, automatic summary producers, automatic translators, and more. These applications have considerable economic potential, and it is therefore important for linguists to make use of these technologies and to be able to contribute to them. The author provides linguists with tools to help them formalize natural languages and aid in the building of software able to automatically process texts written in natural language (Natural Language Processing, or NLP). Computers are a vital tool for this, as characterizing a phenomenon using mathematical rules leads to its formalization. NooJ a linguistic development environment software developed by the author is described and practically applied to examples of NLP.

Seit dem Entstehen der modernen Textlinguistik in den 1960er Jahren ist eine Vielzahl z.T. hoch spezialisierter Analyseansatze in diesem Bereich entwickelt worden, die auch in diversen Einfuhrungen schon aufbereitet worden sind. Anliegen dieses Arbeitsheftes ist es, Grundlagen linguistischer Textanalyse vorzustellen, wie sie insbesondere Studierende philologischer Facher bei der Analyse literarischer und anspruchsvoller Sachtexte benotigen. Textlinguistik wird dabei nicht als eine Sonderdisziplin der Sprachwissenschaft aufgefasst, die sich nur mit der "obersten" Beschreibungsebene befasst, sondern im Sinne der von Peter Hartmann konzipierten "verwendungsorientierten Sprachwissenschaft." Besonderer Wert wird darauf gelegt, die "neue" Textlinguistik auch in die Tradition fruherer Bemuhungen um den Gegenstand einzuordnen (Rhetorik, Hermeneutik, Literaturwissenschaft, vorstrukturalistische Grammatik). Das Schwergewicht der Darstellung liegt auf der mit vielen Beispielen angereicherten Erlauterung der vier zentralen Beschreibungsdimensionen: situativer Kontext, Funktion, Thema, sprachliche Gestalt. Hier werden nicht nur die den Textzusammenhalt gewahrleistenden Kohasionsmittel besprochen, sondern die Gesamtheit der sprachlichen Mittel, v.a. auf der Ebene von Lexik und Grammatik. Ziel ist es, die Verbindung zwischen Variationslinguistik und Textlinguistik zu verdeutlichen: Zu den Aufgaben der letzteren gehort es, die Soll- und Ist-Normen von Varietaten und Textsorten zu beschreiben."

Deep learning is revolutionizing how machine translation systems are built today. This book introduces the challenge of machine translation and evaluation - including historical, linguistic, and applied context -- then develops the core deep learning methods used for natural language applications. Code examples in Python give readers a hands-on blueprint for understanding and implementing their own machine translation systems. The book also provides extensive coverage of machine learning tricks, issues involved in handling various forms of data, model enhancements, and current challenges and methods for analysis and visualization. Summaries of the current research in the field make this a state-of-the-art textbook for undergraduate and graduate classes, as well as an essential reference for researchers and developers interested in other applications of neural methods in the broader field of human language processing.

Stress and accent are central, organizing features of grammar, but their precise nature continues to be a source of mystery and wonder. These issues come to the forefront in acquisition, where the tension between the abstract mental representations and the concrete physical manifestations of stress and accent is deeply reflected. Understanding the nature of the representations of stress and accent patterns, and understanding how stress and accent patterns are learned, informs all aspects of linguistic theory and language acquisition. These two themes - representation and acquisition - form the organizational backbone of this book. Each is addressed along different dimensions of stress and accent, including the position of an accent or stress within various prosodic domains and the acoustic dimensions along which the pronunciation of stress and accent may vary. The research presented in the book is multidisciplinary, encompassing theoretical linguistics, speech science, and computational and experimental research.

This book reviews ways to improve statistical machine speech translation between Polish and English. Research has been conducted mostly on dictionary-based, rule-based, and syntax-based, machine translation techniques. Most popular methodologies and tools are not well-suited for the Polish language and therefore require adaptation, and language resources are lacking in parallel and monolingual data. The main objective of this volume to develop an automatic and robust Polish-to-English translation system to meet specific translation requirements and to develop bilingual textual resources by mining comparable corpora.

Event structures are central in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence research: people can easily refer to changes in the world, identify their participants, distinguish relevant information, and have expectations of what can happen next. Part of this process is based on mechanisms similar to narratives, which are at the heart of information sharing. But it remains difficult to automatically detect events or automatically construct stories from such event representations. This book explores how to handle today's massive news streams and provides multidimensional, multimodal, and distributed approaches, like automated deep learning, to capture events and narrative structures involved in a 'story'. This overview of the current state-of-the-art on event extraction, temporal and casual relations, and storyline extraction aims to establish a new multidisciplinary research community with a common terminology and research agenda. Graduate students and researchers in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and media studies will benefit from this book.

Ruslan Mitkov's highly successful Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics has been substantially revised and expanded in this second edition. Alongside updated accounts of the topics covered in the first edition, it includes 17 new chapters on subjects such as semantic role-labelling, text-to-speech synthesis, translation technology, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and the application of Natural Language Processing in educational and biomedical contexts, among many others. The volume is divided into four parts that examine, respectively: the linguistic fundamentals of computational linguistics; the methods and resources used, such as statistical modelling, machine learning, and corpus annotation; key language processing tasks including text segmentation, anaphora resolution, and speech recognition; and the major applications of Natural Language Processing, from machine translation to author profiling. The book will be an essential reference for researchers and students in computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, as well as those working in related industries.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the role of recursion in language in two distinct but interconnected ways. First, David J. Lobina examines how recursion applies at different levels within a full description of natural language. Specifically, he identifies and evaluates recursion as: a) a central property of the computational system underlying the faculty of language; b) a possible feature of the derivations yielded by this computational system; c) a global characteristic of the structures generated by the language faculty; and d) a probable factor in the parsing operations employed during the processing of recursive structures. Second, the volume orders these different levels into a tripartite explanatory framework. According to this framework, the investigation of any particular cognitive domain must begin by first outlining what sort of mechanical procedure underlies the relevant capacity (including what sort of structures it generates). Only then, the author argues, can we properly investigate its implementation, both at the level of abstract computations typical of competence-level analyses, and at the level of the real-time processing of behaviour.

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.

The content of this textbook is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots. The main topic is the mechanism of natural language communication in both the speaker and the hearer. In the third edition the author has modernized the text, leaving the overview of traditional, theoretical, and computational linguistics, analytic philosophy of language, and mathematical complexity theory with their historical backgrounds intact. The format of the empirical analyses of English and German syntax and semantics has been adapted to current practice; and Chaps. 22-24 have been rewritten to focus more sharply on the construction of a talking robot.

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.

Natural language is easy for people and hard for machines. For two generations, the tantalizing goal has been to get computers to handle human languages in ways that will be compelling and useful to people. Obstacles are many and legendary. Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach describes one group's decade of research in pursuit of that goal. A very broad coverage NLP system, including a programming language (PLNLP) development tools, and analysis and synthesis components, was developed and incorporated into a variety of well-known practical applications, ranging from text critiquing (CRITIQUE) to machine translation (e.g. SHALT). This books represents the first published collection of papers describing the system and how it has been used. Twenty-six authors from nine countries contributed to this volume. Natural language analysis, in the PLNLP approach, is done is six stages that move smoothly from syntax through semantics into discourse. The initial syntactic sketch is provided by an Augmented Phrase Structure Grammar (APSG) that uses exclusively binary rules and aims to produce some reasonable analysis for any input string. Its `approximate' analysis passes to the reassignment component, which takes the default syntactic attachments and adjusts them, using semantic information obtained by parsing definitions and example sentences from machine-readable dictionaries. This technique is an example of one facet of the PLNLP approach: the use of natural language itself as a knowledge representation language -- an innovation that permits a wide variety of online text materials to be exploited as sources of semantic information. The next stage computes the intrasential argument structure and resolves all references, both NP- and VP-anaphora, that can be treated at this point in the processing. Subsequently, additional components, currently not so well developed as the earlier ones, handle the further disambiguation of word senses, the normalization of paraphrases, and the construction of a paragraph (discourse) model by joining sentential semantic graphs. Natural Language Processing: The PLNLP Approach acquaints the reader with the theory and application of a working, real-world, domain-free NLP system, and attempts to bridge the gap between computational and theoretical models of linguistic structure. It provides a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of computational linguistics, natural processing, artificial intelligence, and information science.

This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.

This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes across a wide range of contemporary linguistic theories, such as Cognitive Grammar, Minimalist Syntax, and Lexical Functional Grammar, while the focus of Part III is on individual word classes, from major categories such as verb and noun to minor ones such as adpositions and ideophones. Part IV provides a number of cross-linguistic case studies, exploring word classes in families including Afroasiatic, Sinitic, Mayan, Austronesian, and in sign languages. Chapters in the final part of the book discuss word classes from the perspective of various sub-disciplines of linguistics, ranging from first and second language acquisition to computational and corpus linguistics. Together, the contributions showcase the importance of word classes for the whole discipline of linguistics, while also highlighting the many ongoing debates in the areas and outlining fruitful avenues for future research.

This book explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of constituent structure in natural language syntax. It surveys a wide variety of functionalist and formalist theoretical approaches, from dependency grammars and Relational Grammar to Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Minimalism. It describes the traditional tests for constituency and the formal means for representing them in phrase structure grammars, extended phrase structure grammars, X-bar theory, and set theoretic bare phrase structure. In doing so it provides a clear, thorough, and rigorous axiomatic description of the structural properties of constituent trees.
Andrew Carnie considers the central controversies on constituent structure. Is it, for example, a primitive notion or should it be derived from relational or semantic form? Do sentences have a single constituency or multiple constituencies? Does constituency operate on single or multiple dimensions? And what exactly is the categorial content of constituent structure representations? He identifies points of commonality as well as important theoretical differences among the various approaches to constituency, and critically examines the strengths and limitations of competing frameworks.
This new edition includes textual revisions as well as a new final chapter and ensures that Constituent Structure remains the definitive guide to constituency for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as theoretical linguists of all persuasions in departments of linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, and related fields.

This book explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of constituent structure in natural language syntax. It surveys a wide variety of functionalist and formalist theoretical approaches, from dependency grammars and Relational Grammar to Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Minimalism. It describes the traditional tests for constituency and the formal means for representing them in phrase structure grammars, extended phrase structure grammars, X-bar theory, and set theoretic bare phrase structure. In doing so it provides a clear, thorough, and rigorous axiomatic description of the structural properties of constituent trees.
Andrew Carnie considers the central controversies on constituent structure. Is it, for example, a primitive notion or should it be derived from relational or semantic form? Do sentences have a single constituency or multiple constituencies? Does constituency operate on single or multiple dimensions? And what exactly is the categorial content of constituent structure representations? He identifies points of commonality as well as important theoretical differences among the various approaches to constituency, and critically examines the strengths and limitations of competing frameworks.
This new edition includes textual revisions as well as a new final chapter and ensures that Constituent Structure remains the definitive guide to constituency for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as theoretical linguists of all persuasions in departments of linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, and related fields.

This book explores the relationship between online second language (L2) communicative activities and formal language learning. It provides empirical evidence of the scale of L2 English use online, investigating the forms most commonly used, the activities likely to cause discomfort and the challenges experienced by users, and takes a critical approach to the nature of language online beyond the paradigms of 'written' versus 'spoken'. The author explores the possibilities for language teaching practices that engage with and integrate learners' L2 English online use, not only to support it but to use it as input for classroom learning and to enhance and exploit its incidental learning outcomes. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers interested in computer-mediated communication, online discourse and Activity Theory, while language teachers will find the practical ideas for lesson content invaluable as they strive to create a successful language learning community.

This important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components of the grammar and increases the symmetry in syntax. Its central hypothesis has broad empirical application and at the same time reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an optimal system.
Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality. He argues that the domains which render syntactic processes local (such as islands, bounding nodes, barriers, and phases in all their cartographic manifestations) are better understood once reduced to, or combined with, the basic syntactic operation, Merge, and its core representation, the X-bar schema. In a detailed examination of the mechanism of phrasal projection or labelling he shows that viewing chains as X-bar phrases allows conditions on chain formation or movement to be captured.
Clearly argued, accessibly written, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of languages, Bare Syntax will appeal to linguists and others interested in syntactic theory at graduate level and above.

This book collects and introduces some of the best and most useful work in practical lexicography. It has been designed as a resource for students and scholars of lexicography and lexicology and to be an essential reference for professional lexicographers. It focusses on central issues in the field and covers topics hotly debated in lexicography circles. After a full contextual introduction Thierry Fontenelle divides the book into twelve parts - theoretical perspectives, corpus design, lexicographical evidence, word senses and polysemy, collocations and idioms, definitions, examples, grammar and usage, bilingual lexicography, tools and methods, semantic networks, and how dictionaries are used. The book is fully referenced and indexed.
The reader may be used independently for reference or as reading material for a course of study. It will also be an essential companion for The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography by Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, to be published by OUP in 2008.

Specifically designed for linguists, this book provides an introduction to programming using Python for those with little to no experience of coding. Python is one of the most popular and widely-used programming languages as it's also available for free and runs on any operating system. All examples in the text involve language data and can be adapted or used directly for language research. The text focuses on key language-related issues: searching, text manipulation, text encoding and internet data, providing an excellent resource for language research. More experienced users of Python will also benefit from the advanced chapters on graphical user interfaces and functional programming.

One of the challenges brought on by the digital revolution of the recent decades is the mechanism by which information carried by texts can be extracted in order to access its contents. The processing of named entities remains a very active area of research, which plays a central role in natural language processing technologies and their applications. Named entity recognition, a tool used in information extraction tasks, focuses on recognizing small pieces of information in order to extract information on a larger scale. The authors use written text and examples in French and English to present the necessary elements for the readers to familiarize themselves with the main concepts related to named entities and to discover the problems associated with them, as well as the methods available in practice for solving these issues.

The breadth and spread of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) indicate its usefulness for exploring language use within a social context. However, its theoretical foundations, limitations, and its epistemological implications must be considered so that we can adjust our research designs accordingly. This Element focuses on important meta-level questions around epistemology, while also offering a compact guide to which corpus linguistic tools are available and how they can contribute to finding out more about discourse. This Element will appeal to researchers both new and experienced, both within the CADS community and beyond.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts.  Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models.  After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

The relation between ontologies and language is currently at the forefront of natural language processing (NLP). Ontologies, as widely used models in semantic technologies, have much in common with the lexicon. A lexicon organizes words as a conventional inventory of concepts, while an ontology formalizes concepts and their logical relations. A shared lexicon is the prerequisite for knowledge-sharing through language, and a shared ontology is the prerequisite for knowledge-sharing through information technology. In building models of language, computational linguists must be able to accurately map the relations between words and the concepts that they can be linked to. This book focuses on the technology involved in enabling integration between lexical resources and semantic technologies. It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in NLP, computational linguistics, and knowledge engineering, as well as in semantics, psycholinguistics, lexicology and morphology/syntax.

Dynamical Grammar explores the consequences for language acquisition, language evolution, and linguistic theory of taking the underlying architecture of the language faculty to be that of a complex adaptive dynamical system. It contains the first results of a new and complex model of language acquisition which the authors have developed to measure how far language input is reflected in language output and thereby get a better idea of just how far the human language faculty is hard-wired.