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.

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.

This two-volume set, consisting of LNCS 7181 and LNCS 7182, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Linguistics and Intelligent Processing, held in New Delhi, India, in March 2012. The total of 92 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The contents have been ordered according to the following topical sections: NLP system architecture; lexical resources; morphology and syntax; word sense disambiguation and named entity recognition; semantics and discourse; sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and emotions; natural language generation; machine translation and multilingualism; text categorization and clustering; information extraction and text mining; information retrieval and question answering; document summarization; and applications.

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 centers 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.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics provides a timely overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Through the electronic analysis of large bodies of text, corpus linguistics demonstrates and supports linguistic statements and assumptions. In recent years it has seen an ever-widening application in a variety of fields: computational linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, pragmatics and translation studies. Bringing together experts in the key areas of development and change, the handbook is structured around six themes which take the reader through building and designing a corpus to using a corpus to study literature and translation. A comprehensive introduction covers the historical development of the field and its growing influence and application in other areas. Structured around five headings for ease of reference, each contribution includes further reading sections with three to five key texts highlighted and annotated to facilitate further exploration of the topics. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics is the ideal resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.

Grammars of natural languages can be expressed as mathematical objects, similar to computer programs. Such a formal presentation of grammars facilitates mathematical reasoning with grammars (and the languages they denote), as well as computational implementation of grammar processors. This book presents one of the most commonly used grammatical formalisms, Unification Grammars, which underlies contemporary linguistic theories such as Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The book provides a robust and rigorous exposition of the formalism that is both mathematically well-founded and linguistically motivated. While the material is presented formally, and much of the text is mathematically oriented, a core chapter of the book addresses linguistic applications and the implementation of several linguistic insights in unification grammars. Dozens of examples and numerous exercises (many with solutions) illustrate key points. Graduate students and researchers in both computer science and linguistics will find this book a valuable resource.

This book presents a collection of papers on the issue of focus in its broadest sense. While commonly being considered as related to phenomena such as presupposition and anaphora, focusing is much more widely spread, and it is this pervasiveness that this collection addresses. The volume explicitly aims to bring together theoretical, psychological, and descriptive approaches to focus, at the same time maintaining the overall interest in how these notions apply to the larger problem of evolving some formal representation of the semantic aspects of linguistic content. The contributed papers to this volume have been reworked from a selection of original work presented at a conference held in 1994 in Schloss Wolfsbrunnen in Germany.

Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics consists of introductory level textbooks covering the core topics in Applied Linguistics, designed for those entering postgraduate studies and language professionals returning to academic study. The books take an innovative "practice to theory" approach, with a back to front structure which takes the reader from real life problems and issues in the field, then enters into a discussion of intervention and how to engage with these concerns. The final section concludes by tying the practical issues to theoretical foundations. Additional features include tasks with commentaries, a glossary of key terms, and an annotated further reading section.

Corpus linguistics is a key area of applied linguistics and one of the most rapidly developing. Winnie Cheng s practical approach guides readers in acquiring the relevant knowledge and theories to enable the analysis, explanation and interpretation of language using corpus methods.

Throughout the book practical classroom examples, concordance based analyses and tasks such as designing and conducting mini-projects are used to connect and explain the conceptual and practical aspects of corpus linguistics.

Exploring Corpus Linguistics is an essential textbook for post-graduate/graduate students new to the field and for advanced undergraduates studying English Language and Applied Linguistics.

Originally published in 1997, this book is concerned with human language technology. This technology provides computers with the capability to handle spoken and written language. One major goal is to improve communication between humans and machines. If people can use their own language to access information, working with software applications and controlling machinery, the greatest obstacle for the acceptance of new information technology is overcome. Another important goal is to facilitate communication among people. Machines can help to translate texts or spoken input from one human language to the other. Programs that assist people in writing by checking orthography, grammar and style are constantly improving. This book was sponsored by the Directorate General XIII of the European Union and the Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation, USA.

This book contains selected papers from the Colloquium in Honor of Alain Lecomte, held in Pauillac, France, in November 2007. The event was part of the ANR project "Prelude" (Towards Theoretical Pragmatics Based on Ludics and Continuation Theory), the proceedings of which were published in another FoLLI-LNAI volume (LNAI 6505) edited by Alain Lecomte and Samuel Troncon. The selected papers of this Festschrift volume focus on the scientific areas in which Alain Lecomte has worked and to which he has contributed: formal linguistics, computational linguistics, logic, and cognition.

Cross-Word Modeling for Arabic Speech Recognition utilizes phonological rules in order to model the cross-word problem, a merging of adjacent words in speech caused by continuous speech, to enhance the performance of continuous speech recognition systems. The author aims to provide an understanding of the cross-word problem and how it can be avoided, specifically focusing on Arabic phonology using an HHM-based classifier.

This book provides a precise and thorough description of the meaning and use of spatial expressions, using both a linguistics and an artificial intelligence perspective, and also an enlightening discussion of computer models of comprehension and production in the spatial domain. The author proposes a theoretical framework that explains many previously overlooked or misunderstood irregularities. The use of prepositions reveals underlying schematisations and idealisations of the spatial world, which, for the most part, echo representational structures necessary for human action (movement and manipulation). Because spatial cognition seems to provide a key to understanding much of the cognitive system, including language, the book addresses one of the most basic questions confronting cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and brings fresh and original insights to it.

This book presents computational mechanisms for solving common language interpretation problems including many cases of reference resolution, word sense disambiguation, and the interpretation of relationships implicit in modifiers. The proposed memory and context mechanisms provide the means for representing and applying information about the semantic relationships between entities imposed by the cultural context. The effects of different 'context factors', derived from multiple sources, are combined for disambiguation and for limiting memory search; the factors having been created and manipulated gradually during discourse processing.

This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the centre of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centred around a view of the mental lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors.

Placing contemporary spoken English at the centre of phonological research, this book tackles the issue of language variation and change through a range of methodological and theoretical approaches. In doing so the book bridges traditionally separate fields such as experimental phonetics, theoretical phonology, language acquisition and sociolinguistics. Made up of 12 chapters, it explores a substantial range of linguistic phenomena. It covers auditory, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, second language pronunciation and perception, sociophonetics, cross-linguistic comparison of vowel reduction and methodological issues in the construction of phonological corpora. The book presents new data and analyses which demonstrate what phonologists, phoneticians and sociolinguists do with their corpora and show how various theoretical and experimental questions can be explored in light of authentic spoken data.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Conversational AI. While the idea of interacting with a computer using voice or text goes back a long way, it is only in recent years that this idea has become a reality with the emergence of digital personal assistants, smart speakers, and chatbots. Advances in AI, particularly in deep learning, along with the availability of massive computing power and vast amounts of data, have led to a new generation of dialogue systems and conversational interfaces. Current research in Conversational AI focuses mainly on the application of machine learning and statistical data-driven approaches to the development of dialogue systems. However, it is important to be aware of previous achievements in dialogue technology and to consider to what extent they might be relevant to current research and development. Three main approaches to the development of dialogue systems are reviewed: rule-based systems that are handcrafted using best practice guidelines; statistical data-driven systems based on machine learning; and neural dialogue systems based on end-to-end learning. Evaluating the performance and usability of dialogue systems has become an important topic in its own right, and a variety of evaluation metrics and frameworks are described. Finally, a number of challenges for future research are considered, including: multimodality in dialogue systems, visual dialogue; data efficient dialogue model learning; using knowledge graphs; discourse and dialogue phenomena; hybrid approaches to dialogue systems development; dialogue with social robots and in the Internet of Things; and social and ethical issues.

The lexicon is now a major focus of research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), as more linguistic theories concentrate on the lexicon and as the acquisition of an adequate vocabulary has become the chief bottleneck in developing practical NLP systems. This collection describes techniques of lexical representation within a unification-based framework and their linguistic application, concentrating on the issue of structuring the lexicon using inheritance and defaults. Topics covered include typed feature structures, default unification, lexical rules, multiple inheritance and non-monotonic reasoning. The contributions describe both theoretical results and implemented languages and systems, including DATR, the Stuttgart TFS and ISSCO's ELU. This book arose out of a workshop on default inheritance in the lexicon organized as a part of the Esprit ACQUILEX project on computational lexicography. Besides the contributed papers mentioned above, it contains a detailed description of the ACQUILEX lexical knowledge base (LKB) system and its use in the representation of lexicons extracted semi-automatically from machine-readable dictionaries.

This book develops a formal computational theory of writing systems. It offers specific proposals about the linguistic objects that are represented by orthographic elements; what levels of linguistic representation are involved and how they may differ across writing systems; and what formal constraints hold of the mapping relation between linguistic and orthographic elements. Based on the insights gained, Sproat then proposes a taxonomy of writing systems. The treatment of theoretical linguistic issues and their computational implementation is complemented with discussion of empirical psycholinguistic work on reading and its relevance for the computational model developed here. Throughout, the model is illustrated with a number of detailed case studies of writing systems around the world. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in a variety of fields, including theoretical and computational linguistics, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, and speech technology.

A primary problem in the area of natural language processing has been that of semantic analysis. This book aims to look at the semantics of natural languages in context. It presents an approach to the computational processing of English text that combines current theories of knowledge representation and reasoning in Artificial Intelligence with the latest linguistic views of lexical semantics. This results in distinct advantages for relating the semantic analysis of a sentence to its context. A key feature is the clear separation of the lexical entries that represent the domain-specific linguistic information from the semantic interpreter that performs the analysis. The criteria for defining the lexical entries are firmly grounded in current linguistic theories, facilitating integration with existing parsers. This approach has been implemented and tested in Prolog on a domain for physics word problems and full details of the algorithms and code are presented. Semantic Processing for Finite Domains will appeal to postgraduates and researchers in computational linguistics, and to industrial groups specializing in natural language processing.

This book explains how to build Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems - computer software systems which use techniques from artificial intelligence and computational linguistics to automatically generate understandable texts in English or other human languages, either in isolation or as part of multimedia documents, Web pages, and speech output systems. Typically starting from some non-linguistic representation of information as input, NLG systems use knowledge about language and the application domain to automatically produce documents, reports, explanations, help messages, and other kinds of texts. The book covers the algorithms and representations needed to perform the core tasks of document planning, microplanning, and surface realization, using a case study to show how these components fit together. It also discusses engineering issues such as system architecture, requirements analysis, and the integration of text generation into multimedia and speech output systems.

This is a collection of new papers by leading researchers on natural language parsing. In the past, the problem of how people parse the sentences they hear - determine the identity of the words in these sentences and group these words into larger units - has been addressed in very different ways by experimental psychologists, by theoretical linguists, and by researchers in artificial intelligence, with little apparent relationship among the solutions proposed by each group. However, because of important advances in all these disciplines, research on parsing in each of these fields now seems to have something significant to contribute to the others, as this volume demonstrates. The volume includes some papers applying the results of experimental psychological studies of parsing to linguistic theory, others which present computational models of parsing, and a mathematical linguistics paper on tree-adjoining grammars and parsing.

People often mean more than they say. Grammar on its own is typically insufficient for determining the full meaning of an utterance; the assumption that the discourse is coherent or 'makes sense' has an important role to play in determining meaning as well. Logics of Conversation presents a dynamic semantic framework called Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, or SDRT, where this interaction between discourse coherence and discourse interpretation is explored in a logically precise manner. Combining ideas from dynamic semantics, commonsense reasoning and speech act theory, SDRT uses its analysis of rhetorical relations to capture intuitively compelling implicatures. It provides a computable method for constructing these logical forms and is one of the most formally precise and linguistically grounded accounts of discourse interpretation currently available. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in linguistics and in philosophy of language.

Empirical translation studies is a rapidly evolving research area. This volume, written by world-leading researchers, demonstrates the integration of two new research paradigms: socially-oriented and data driven approaches to empirical translation studies. These two models expand current translation studies and stimulate reader debates around how development of quantitative research methods and integration with advances in translation technologies would significantly increase the research capacities of translation studies. Highly engaging, the volume pioneers the development of socially-oriented innovative research methods to enhance the current research capacities of theoretical (descriptive) translation studies in order to tackle real-life research issues, such as environmental protection and multicultural health promotion. Illustrative case studies are used, bringing insight into advanced research methodologies of designing, developing and analysing large scale digital databases for multilingual and/or translation research.

This volume is a collection of original contributions that address the problem of words and their meaning. This represents a still difficult and controversial area within various disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Although all of these disciplines have to tackle the issue, so far there is no overarching methodology agreed upon by researchers. The aim of the volume is to provide answers based on empirical linguistics methods that are relevant across all the disciplines and provide a bridge among researchers looking at word meaning from different angles.