Natural language processing (NLP) went through a profound transformation in the mid-1980s when it shifted to make heavy use of corpora and data-driven techniques to analyze language. Since then, the use of statistical techniques in NLP has evolved in several ways. One such example of evolution took place in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when full-fledged Bayesian machinery was introduced to NLP. This Bayesian approach to NLP has come to accommodate various shortcomings in the frequentist approach and to enrich it, especially in the unsupervised setting, where statistical learning is done without target prediction examples. In this book, we cover the methods and algorithms that are needed to fluently read Bayesian learning papers in NLP and to do research in the area. These methods and algorithms are partially borrowed from both machine learning and statistics and are partially developed "in-house" in NLP. We cover inference techniques such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and variational inference, Bayesian estimation, and nonparametric modeling. In response to rapid changes in the field, this second edition of the book includes a new chapter on representation learning and neural networks in the Bayesian context. We also cover fundamental concepts in Bayesian statistics such as prior distributions, conjugacy, and generative modeling. Finally, we review some of the fundamental modeling techniques in NLP, such as grammar modeling, neural networks and representation learning, and their use with Bayesian analysis.

The two-volume set LNCS 13451 and 13452 constitutes revised selected papers from the CICLing 2019 conference which took place in La Rochelle, France, April 2019.The total of 95 papers presented in the two volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 335 submissions. The book also contains 3 invited papers. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: General, Information extraction, Information retrieval, Language modeling, Lexical resources, Machine translation, Morphology, sintax, parsing, Name entity recognition, Semantics and text similarity, Sentiment analysis, Speech processing, Text categorization, Text generation, and Text mining.

What is the lexicon, what does it contain, and how is it structured? What principles determine the functioning of the lexicon as a component of natural language grammar? What role does lexical information play in linguistic theory? This accessible introduction aims to answer these questions, and explores the relation of the lexicon to grammar as a whole. It includes a critical overview of major theoretical frameworks, and puts forward a unified treatment of lexical structure and design. The text can be used for introductory and advanced courses, and for courses that touch upon different aspects of the lexicon, such as lexical semantics, lexicography, syntax, general linguistics, computational lexicology and ontology design. The book provides students with a set of tools which will enable them to work with lexical data for all kinds of purposes, including an abundance of exercises and in-class activities designed to ensure that students are actively engaged with the content and effectively acquire the necessary knowledge and skills they need.

This updated book expands upon prosody for recognition applications of speech processing. It includes importance of prosody for speech processing applications; builds on why prosody needs to be incorporated in speech processing applications; and presents methods for extraction and representation of prosody for applications such as speaker recognition, language recognition and speech recognition. The updated book also includes information on the significance of prosody for emotion recognition and various prosody-based approaches for automatic emotion recognition from speech.

The two-volume set LNCS 9623 + 9624 constitutes revised selected papers from the CICLing 2016 conference which took place in Konya, Turkey, in April 2016. The total of 89 papers presented in the two volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 298 submissions. The book also contains 4 invited papers and a memorial paper on Adam Kilgarriff's Legacy to Computational Linguistics. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Part I: In memoriam of Adam Kilgarriff; general formalisms; embeddings, language modeling, and sequence labeling; lexical resources and terminology extraction; morphology and part-of-speech tagging; syntax and chunking; named entity recognition; word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution; semantics, discourse, and dialog. Part II: machine translation and multilingualism; sentiment analysis, opinion mining, subjectivity, and social media; text classification and categorization; information extraction; and applications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2017, held in Liege, Belgium, in August 2017.The 24 full papers and 6 (abstract of) invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers cover the following topics and areas: combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; grammars acceptors and transducers for strings, trees, graphics, arrays; algebraic theories for automata and languages; codes; efficient text algorithms; symbolic dynamics; decision problems; relationships to complexity theory and logic; picture description and analysis, polyominoes and bidimensional patterns; cryptography; concurrency; celluar automata; bio-inspiredcomputing; quantum computing.

This is the latest addition to a group of handbooks covering the field of morphology, alongside The Oxford Handbook of Case (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology (2014). It provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of work on inflection - the expression of grammatical information through changes in word forms. The volume's 24 chapters are written by experts in the field from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, with examples drawn from a wide range of languages. The first part of the handbook covers the fundamental building blocks of inflectional form and content: morphemes, features, and means of exponence. Part 2 focuses on what is arguably the most characteristic property of inflectional systems, paradigmatic structure, and the non-trivial nature of the mapping between function and form. The third part deals with change and variation over time, and the fourth part covers computational issues from a theoretical and practical standpoint. Part 5 addresses psycholinguistic questions relating to language acquisition and neurocognitive disorders. The final part is devoted to sketches of individual inflectional systems, illustrating a range of typological possibilities across a genetically diverse set of languages from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Australia, Europe, and South America.

This book presents an overview of speaker recognition technologies with an emphasis on dealing with robustness issues. Firstly, the book gives an overview of speaker recognition, such as the basic system framework, categories under different criteria, performance evaluation and its development history. Secondly, with regard to robustness issues, the book presents three categories, including environment-related issues, speaker-related issues and application-oriented issues. For each category, the book describes the current hot topics, existing technologies, and potential research focuses in the future. The book is a useful reference book and self-learning guide for early researchers working in the field of robust speech recognition.

How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2016, held in Toulouse, France, in September 2016. The 10 full papers and 8 short papers presented together with 5 best of the labs papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. In addition to these talks, this volume contains the results of 7 benchmarking labs reporting their year long activities in overview talks and lab sessions. The papers address all aspects of information access in any modality and language and cover a broad rangeof topics in the fields of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation.

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 case study-based textbook in multivariate analysis for advanced students in the humanities emphasizes descriptive, exploratory analyses of various types of datasets from a wide range of sub-disciplines, promoting the use of multivariate analysis and illustrating its wide applicability. Fields featured include, but are not limited to, historical agriculture, arts (music and painting), theology, and stylometrics (authorship issues). Most analyses are based on existing data, earlier analysed in published peer-reviewed papers. Four preliminary methodological and statistical chapters provide general technical background to the case studies. The multivariate statistical methods presented and illustrated include data inspection, several varieties of principal component analysis, correspondence analysis, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, regression analysis, discriminant analysis, and three-mode analysis. The bulk of the text is taken up by 14 case studies that lean heavily on graphical representations of statistical information such as biplots, using descriptive statistical techniques to support substantive conclusions. Each study features a description of the substantive background to the data, followed by discussion of appropriate multivariate techniques, and detailed results interpreted through graphical illustrations. Each study is concluded with a conceptual summary. Datasets in SPSS are included online.

Tense and aspect are means by which language refers to time-how an event takes place in the past, present, or future. They play a key role in understanding the grammar and structure of all languages, and interest in them reaches across linguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that currently form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas. The volume contains 36 chapters, divided into 6 sections, written by internationally known experts in theoretical linguistics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2015, held in Toulouse, France, in September 2015. The 31 full papers and 20 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. They cover a broad range of issues in the fields of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation, also included are a set of labs and workshops designed to test different aspects of mono and cross-language information retrieval systems.

This book explains how can be created information extraction (IE) applications that are able to tap the vast amount of relevant information available in natural language sources: Internet pages, official documents such as laws and regulations, books and newspapers, and social web. Readers are introduced to the problem of IE and its current challenges and limitations, supported with examples. The book discusses the need to fill the gap between documents, data, and people, and provides a broad overview of the technology supporting IE. The authors present a generic architecture for developing systems that are able to learn how to extract relevant information from natural language documents, and illustrate how to implement working systems using state-of-the-art and freely available software tools. The book also discusses concrete applications illustrating IE uses. * Provides an overview of state-of-the-art technology in information extraction (IE), discussing achievements and limitations for the software developer and providing references for specialized literature in the area * Presents a comprehensive list of freely available, high quality software for several subtasks of IE and for several natural languages * Describes a generic architecture that can learn how to extract information for a given application domain

This book introduces audio watermarking methods for copyright protection, which has drawn extensive attention for securing digital data from unauthorized copying. The book is divided into two parts. First, an audio watermarking method in discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) domains using singular value decomposition (SVD) and quantization is introduced. This method is robust against various attacks and provides good imperceptible watermarked sounds. Then, an audio watermarking method in fast Fourier transform (FFT) domain using SVD and Cartesian-polar transformation (CPT) is presented. This method has high imperceptibility and high data payload and it provides good robustness against various attacks. These techniques allow media owners to protect copyright and to show authenticity and ownership of their material in a variety of applications. * Features new methods of audio watermarking for copyright protection and ownership protection * Outlines techniques that provide superior performance in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and data payload * Includes applications such as data authentication, data indexing, broadcast monitoring, fingerprinting, etc.

The two volumes LNCS 9041 and 9042 constitute the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing 2015, held in Cairo, Egypt, in April 2015. The total of 95 full papers presented was carefully reviewed and selected from 329 submissions. They were organized in topical sections on grammar formalisms and lexical resources; morphology and chunking; syntax and parsing; anaphora resolution and word sense disambiguation; semantics and dialogue; machine translation and multilingualism; sentiment analysis and emotion detection; opinion mining and social network analysis; natural language generation and text summarization; information retrieval, question answering, and information extraction; text classification; speech processing; and applications.

The two volumes LNCS 9041 and 9042 constitute the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing 2015, held in Cairo, Egypt, in April 2015. The total of 95 full papers presented was carefully reviewed and selected from 329 submissions. They were organized in topical sections on grammar formalisms and lexical resources; morphology and chunking; syntax and parsing; anaphora resolution and word sense disambiguation; semantics and dialogue; machine translation and multilingualism; sentiment analysis and emotion detection; opinion mining and social network analysis; natural language generation and text summarization; information retrieval, question answering, and information extraction; text classification; speech processing; and applications.

This is the latest addition to a group of handbooks covering the field of morphology, alongside The Oxford Handbook of Case (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology (2014). It provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of work on inflection - the expression of grammatical information through changes in word forms. The volume's 24 chapters are written by experts in the field from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, with examples drawn from a wide range of languages. The first part of the handbook covers the fundamental building blocks of inflectional form and content: morphemes, features, and means of exponence. Part 2 focuses on what is arguably the most characteristic property of inflectional systems, paradigmatic structure, and the non-trivial nature of the mapping between function and form. The third part deals with change and variation over time, and the fourth part covers computational issues from a theoretical and practical standpoint. Part 5 addresses psycholinguistic questions relating to language acquisition and neurocognitive disorders. The final part is devoted to sketches of individual inflectional systems, illustrating a range of typological possibilities across a genetically diverse set of languages from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Australia, Europe, and South America.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19 International Conference on Formal Grammar 2014, collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in August 2014. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 19 submissions. Traditionally linguistics has been studied from the point of view of the arts, humanities and letters, but in order to make concrete ideas which might otherwise be fanciful the study of grammar has been increasingly subject to the rigours of computer science and mathematization i.e. articulation in the language of science.

This is an essential guide to using digital resources in the study of English language and linguistics. Assuming no prior experience, it introduces the fundamentals of online corpora and equips readers with the skills needed to search and interpret corpus data. Later chapters focus on specific elements of linguistic analysis, namely vocabulary, grammar, discourse and pronunciation. Examples from five major online corpora illustrate key issues to consider in corpus analysis, while case studies and activities help students get to grips with the wide range of resources that are available and select those that best suit their needs. Perfect for students of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics, this engaging and accessible guide opens the door to an ever-expanding world of online resources. It is also ideal for anyone who is curious about how the English language works and has a desire to explore its many written and spoken forms. New to this Edition: - Fully revised and updated throughout, incorporating the latest developments in corpus linguistics - Expanded material on corpora in teaching, contextualising corpus texts and critical discourse analysis

There are not many people who can be said to have influenced and impressed researchers in so many disparate areas and language-geographic fields as Lauri Carlson, as is evidenced in the present Festschrift. His insight and acute linguistic sensitivity and linguistic rationality have spawned findings and research work in many areas, from non-standard etymology to hardcore formal linguistics, not forgetting computational areas such as parsing, terminological databases, and, last but not least, machine translation. In addition to his renowned and widely acknowledged insights in tense and aspect and its relationship with nominal quantification, and his ground-breaking work in dialog using game-theoretic machinery, Lauri has in the last fifteen years as Professor of Language Theory and Translation Technology contributed immensely to areas such as translation, terminology and general applications of computational linguistics. The three editors of the present volume have successfully performed doctoral studies under Lauri's supervision, and wish with this volume to pay tribute to his supervision and to his influence in matters associated with research and scientific, linguistic and philosophical inquiry, as well as to his humanity and friendship.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics (LACL 2014) held in Toulouse, France, in June 2014. On the broadly syntactic side, there are papers on the logical and computational foundations of context free grammars, pregroup grammars, on the Lambek calculus and on formalizations of aspects of minimalism. There is also a paper on Abstract Categorical Grammar, as well as papers on issues at the syntax/semantics interface. On the semantic side, the volume's papers address monotonicity reasoning and the semantics of adverbs in type theory, proof theoretical semantics and predicate and argument invariance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2013, held in Valencia, Spain, in September 2013. The 32 papers and 2 keynotes presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers are organized in topical sections named: evaluation and visualization; multilinguality and less-resourced languages; applications; and Lab overviews.

This white paper is part of a series that promotes knowledge about language technology and its potential. It addresses educators, journalists, politicians, language communities and others. The availability and use of language technology in Europe varies between languages. Consequently, the actions that are required to further support research and development of language technologies also differ for each language. The required actions depend on many factors, such as the complexity of a given language and the size of its community. META-NET, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission, has conducted an analysis of current language resources and technologies. This analysis focused on the 23 official European languages as well as other important national and regional languages in Europe. The results of this analysis suggest that there are many significant research gaps for each language. A more detailed expert analysis and assessment of the current situation will help maximise the impact of additional research and minimize any risks. META-NET consists of 54 research centres from 33 countries that are working with stakeholders from commercial businesses, government agencies, industry, research organisations, software companies, technology providers and European universities. Together, they are creating a common technology vision while developing a strategic research agenda that shows how language technology applications can address any research gaps by 2020.