The papers collected in this volume are selected as a sample of the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) performed within the Italian NLP community and especially attested by the PARLI project. PARLI (Portale per l'Accesso alle Risorse in Lingua Italiana) is a project partially funded by the Ministero Italiano per l'Universita e la Ricerca (PRIN 2008) from 2008 to 2012 for monitoring and fostering the harmonic growth and coordination of the activities of Italian NLP. It was proposed by various teams of researchers working in Italian universities and research institutions. According to the spirit of the PARLI project, most of the resources and tools created within the project and here described are freely distributed and they did not terminate their life at the end of the project itself, hoping they could be a key factor in future development of computational linguistics.

Semantic agent systems are about the integration of the semantic Web, software agents, and multi-agent systems technologies. Like in the past (e.g. biology and informatics yielding bioinformatics) a whole new perspective is emerging with semantic agent systems. In this context, the semantic Web is a Web of semantically linked data which aims to enable man and machine to execute tasks in tandem. Here, software agents in a multi-agent system as delegates of humans are endowed with power to use semantically linked data. This edited book "Semantic Agent Systems: Foundations and Applications" proposes contributions on a wide range of topics on foundations and applications written by a selection of international experts. It first introduces in an accessible style the nature of semantic agent systems. Then it explores with numerous illustrations new frontiers in software agent technology. "Semantic Agent Systems: Foundations and Applications" is recommended for scientists, experts, researchers, and learners in the field of artificial intelligence, the semantic Web, software agents, and multi-agent systems technologies.

The book gives a comprehensive discussion of Database Semantics (DBS) as an agent-based data-driven theory of how natural language communication essentially works. In language communication, agents switch between speak mode, driven by cognition-internal content (input) resulting in cognition-external raw data (e.g. sound waves or pixels, which have no meaning or grammatical properties but can be measured by natural science), and hear mode, driven by the raw data produced by the speaker resulting in cognition-internal content. The motivation is to compare two approaches for an ontology of communication: agent-based data-driven vs. sign-based substitution-driven. Agent-based means: design of a cognitive agent with (i) an interface component for converting raw data into cognitive content (recognition) and converting cognitive content into raw data (action), (ii) an on-board, content-addressable memory (database) for the storage and content retrieval, (iii) separate treatments of the speak and the hear mode. Data-driven means: (a) mapping a cognitive content as input to the speak-mode into a language-dependent surface as output, (b) mapping a surface as input to the hear-mode into a cognitive content as output. Oppositely, sign-based means: no distinction between speak and hear mode, whereas substitution-driven means: using a single start symbol as input for generating infinitely many outputs, based on substitutions by rewrite rules. Collecting recent research of the author, this beautiful, novel and original exposition begins with an introduction to DBS, makes a linguistic detour on subject/predicate gapping and slot-filler repetition, and moves on to discuss computational pragmatics, inference and cognition, grammatical disambiguation and other related topics. The book is mostly addressed to experts working in the field of computational linguistics, as well as to enthusiasts interested in the history and early development of this subject, starting with the pre-computational foundations of theoretical computer science and symbolic logic in the 30s.

The book presents the history of time-domain representation and the extent of its development along with that of spectral domain representation in the cognitive and technology domains. It discusses all the cognitive experiments related to this development, along with details of technological developments related to both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text to speech synthesis (TTS), and introduces a viable time-domain representation for both objective and subjective analysis, as an alternative to the well-known spectral representation. The book also includes a new cohort study on the use of lexical knowledge in ASR. India has numerous official dialects, and spoken-language technology development is a burgeoning area. In fact TTS and ASR taken together constitute the most important technology for empowering people. As such, the book describes time domain representation in such a way that it can be easily and seamlessly incorporated into ASR and TTS research and development. In short, it is a valuable guidebook for the development of ASR and TTS in all the Indian Standard Dialects using signal domain parameters.

The infonnation revolution is upon us. Whereas the industrial revolution heralded the systematic augmentation of human physical limitations by har nessing external energy sources, the infonnation revolution strives to augment human memory and mental processing limitations by harnessing external computational resources. Computers can accumulate. transmit and output much more infonnation and in a more timely fashion than more con ventional printed or spoken media. Of greater interest, however, is the computer's ability to process, classify and retrieve infonnation selectively in response to the needs of each human user. One cannot drink from the fire hydrant of infonnation without being immediately flooded with irrelevant text. Recent technological advances such as optical character readers only exacerbate the problem by increasing the volume of electronic text. Just as steam and internal combustion engines brought powerful energy sources under control to yield useful work in the industrial revolution, so must we build computational engines that control and apply the vast infonnation sources that they may yield useful knowledge. Information science is the study of systematic means to control, classify, process and retrieve vast amounts of infonnation in electronic fonn. In par ticular, several methodologies have been developed to classify texts manually by annies of human indexers, as illustrated quite clearly at the National Library ofMedicine, and many computational techniques have been developed to search textual data bases automatically, such as full-text keyword searches. In general."

This book presents recent advances in NLP and speech technology, a topic attracting increasing interest in a variety of fields through its myriad applications, such as the demand for speech guided touchless technology during the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors present results of recent experimental research that provides contributions and solutions to different issues related to speech technology and speech in industry. Technologies include natural language processing, automatic speech recognition (for under-resourced dialects) and speech synthesis that are useful for applications such as intelligent virtual assistants, among others. Applications cover areas such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining, Arabic named entity recognition, and language modelling. This book is relevant for anyone interested in the latest in language and speech technology.

It is becoming crucial to accurately estimate and monitor speech quality in various ambient environments to guarantee high quality speech communication. This practical hands-on book shows speech intelligibility measurement methods so that the readers can start measuring or estimating speech intelligibility of their own system. The book also introduces subjective and objective speech quality measures, and describes in detail speech intelligibility measurement methods. It introduces a diagnostic rhyme test which uses rhyming word-pairs, and includes: An investigation into the effect of word familiarity on speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility measurement of localized speech in virtual 3-D acoustic space using the rhyme test. Estimation of speech intelligibility using objective measures, including the ITU standard PESQ measures, and automatic speech recognizers.

Voice assistants, automated customer service agents, and other cutting-edge human-to-computer interactions rely on accurately interpreting language as it is written and spoken. Real-world Natural Language Processing teaches you how to create practical NLP applications without getting bogged down in complex language theory and the mathematics of deep learning. In this engaging book, you'll explore the core tools and techniques required to build a huge range of powerful NLP apps. about the technologyNatural language processing is the part of AI dedicated to understanding and generating human text and speech. NLP covers a wide range of algorithms and tasks, from classic functions such as spell checkers, machine translation, and search engines to emerging innovations like chatbots, voice assistants, and automatic text summarization. Wherever there is text, NLP can be useful for extracting meaning and bridging the gap between humans and machines. about the book Real-world Natural Language Processing teaches you how to create practical NLP applications using Python and open source NLP libraries such as AllenNLP and Fairseq. In this practical guide, you'll begin by creating a complete sentiment analyzer, then dive deep into each component to unlock the building blocks you'll use in all different kinds of NLP programs. By the time you're done, you'll have the skills to create named entity taggers, machine translation systems, spelling correctors, and language generation systems. what's inside Design, develop, and deploy basic NLP applications NLP libraries such as AllenNLP and Fairseq Advanced NLP concepts such as attention and transfer learning about the readerAimed at intermediate Python programmers. No mathematical or machine learning knowledge required. about the author Masato Hagiwara received his computer science PhD from Nagoya University in 2009, focusing on Natural Language Processing and machine learning. He has interned at Google and Microsoft Research, and worked at Baidu Japan, Duolingo, and Rakuten Institute of Technology. He now runs his own consultancy business advising clients, including startups and research institutions.

Advances in graph-based natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval tasks have shown the importance of processing using the Graph of Words method. This book covers recent concrete information, from the basics to advanced level, about graph-based learning, such as neural network-based approaches, computational intelligence for learning parameters and feature reduction, and network science for graph-based NPL. It also contains information about language generation based on graphical theories and language models. Features: Presents a comprehensive study of the interdisciplinary graphical approach to NLP Covers recent computational intelligence techniques for graph-based neural network models Discusses advances in random walk-based techniques, semantic webs, and lexical networks Explores recent research into NLP for graph-based streaming data Reviews advances in knowledge graph embedding and ontologies for NLP approaches This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in computer science, natural language processing, and deep and machine learning.

This book presents methods and approaches used to identify the true author of a doubtful document or text excerpt. It provides a broad introduction to all text categorization problems (like authorship attribution, psychological traits of the author, detecting fake news, etc.) grounded in stylistic features. Specifically, machine learning models as valuable tools for verifying hypotheses or revealing significant patterns hidden in datasets are presented in detail. Stylometry is a multi-disciplinary field combining linguistics with both statistics and computer science. The content is divided into three parts. The first, which consists of the first three chapters, offers a general introduction to stylometry, its potential applications and limitations. Further, it introduces the ongoing example used to illustrate the concepts discussed throughout the remainder of the book. The four chapters of the second part are more devoted to computer science with a focus on machine learning models. Their main aim is to explain machine learning models for solving stylometric problems. Several general strategies used to identify, extract, select, and represent stylistic markers are explained. As deep learning represents an active field of research, information on neural network models and word embeddings applied to stylometry is provided, as well as a general introduction to the deep learning approach to solving stylometric questions. In turn, the third part illustrates the application of the previously discussed approaches in real cases: an authorship attribution problem, seeking to discover the secret hand behind the nom de plume Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer known worldwide for her My Brilliant Friend's saga; author profiling in order to identify whether a set of tweets were generated by a bot or a human being and in this second case, whether it is a man or a woman; and an exploration of stylistic variations over time using US political speeches covering a period of ca. 230 years. A solutions-based approach is adopted throughout the book, and explanations are supported by examples written in R. To complement the main content and discussions on stylometric models and techniques, examples and datasets are freely available at the author's Github website.

This volume represents the first attempt in the field of language pedagogy to apply a systems approach to issues in English language education. In the literature of language education, or more specifically, second or foreign language learning and teaching, each topic or issue has often been dealt with independently, and been treated as an isolated item. Taking grammar instruction as an example, grammatical items are often taught in a sequential, step-by-step manner; there has been no "road map" in which the interrelations between the various items are demonstrated. This may be one factor that makes it more difficult for students to learn the language organically. The topics covered in this volume, including language acquisition, pedagogical grammar, and teacher collaboration, are viewed from a holistic perspective. In other words, language pedagogy is approached as a dynamic system of interrelations. In this way, "emergent properties" are expected to manifest. This book is recommended for anyone involved in language pedagogy, including researchers, teachers, and teacher trainers, as well as learners.

Computational semantics is concerned with computing the meanings of linguistic objects such as sentences, text fragments, and dialogue contributions. As such it is the interdisciplinary child of semantics, the study of meaning and its linguistic encoding, and computational linguistics, the discipline that is concerned with computations on linguistic objects.
From one parent computational semantics inherits concepts and techniques that have been developed under the banner of formal (or model-theoretic) semantics. This blend of logic and linguistics applies the methods of logic to the description of meaning. From the other parent the young discipline inherits methods and techniques for parsing sentences, for effective and efficient representation of syntactic structure and logical form, and for reasoning with semantic information. Computational semantics integrates and further develops these methods, concepts and techniques.
This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. It is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who want to know more about the algorithmic realisation of meaning in natural language and about what is happening in this field of research. There is a general introduction by the editors.

Computational Analysis and Understanding of Natural Languages: Principles, Methods and Applications, Volume 38, the latest release in this monograph that provides a cohesive and integrated exposition of these advances and associated applications, includes new chapters on Linguistics: Core Concepts and Principles, Grammars, Open-Source Libraries, Application Frameworks, Workflow Systems, Mathematical Essentials, Probability, Inference and Prediction Methods, Random Processes, Bayesian Methods, Machine Learning, Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Language Core Tasks, Language Understanding Applications, and more. The synergistic confluence of linguistics, statistics, big data, and high-performance computing is the underlying force for the recent and dramatic advances in analyzing and understanding natural languages, hence making this series all the more important.

This book covers the state-of-the-art in deep neural-network-based methods for noise robustness in distant speech recognition applications. It provides insights and detailed descriptions of some of the new concepts and key technologies in the field, including novel architectures for speech enhancement, microphone arrays, robust features, acoustic model adaptation, training data augmentation, and training criteria. The contributed chapters also include descriptions of real-world applications, benchmark tools and datasets widely used in the field. This book is intended for researchers and practitioners working in the field of speech processing and recognition who are interested in the latest deep learning techniques for noise robustness. It will also be of interest to graduate students in electrical engineering or computer science, who will find it a useful guide to this field of research.

This book applies formal language and automata theory in the context of Tibetan computational linguistics; further, it constructs a Tibetan-spelling formal grammar system that generates a Tibetan-spelling formal language group, and an automata group that can recognize the language group. In addition, it investigates the application technologies of Tibetan-spelling formal language and automata. Given its creative and original approach, the book offers a valuable reference guide for researchers, teachers and graduate students in the field of computational linguistics.

This edited volume focuses on big data implications for computational social science and humanities from management to usage. The first part of the book covers geographic data, text corpus data, and social media data, and exemplifies their concrete applications in a wide range of fields including anthropology, economics, finance, geography, history, linguistics, political science, psychology, public health, and mass communications. The second part of the book provides a panoramic view of the development of big data in the fields of computational social sciences and humanities. The following questions are addressed: why is there a need for novel data governance for this new type of data?, why is big data important for social scientists?, and how will it revolutionize the way social scientists conduct research? With the advent of the information age and technologies such as Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things, digital society has fundamentally changed what we now know as "data", the very use of this data, and what we now call "knowledge". Big data has become the standard in social sciences, and has made these sciences more computational. Big Data in Computational Social Science and Humanities will appeal to graduate students and researchers working in the many subfields of the social sciences and humanities.

Data driven methods have long been used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis and have more recently been introduced for dialogue management, spoken language understanding, and Natural Language Generation. Machine learning is now present "end-to-end" in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). However, these techniques require data collection and annotation campaigns, which can be time-consuming and expensive, as well as dataset expansion by simulation. In this book, we provide an overview of the current state of the field and of recent advances, with a specific focus on adaptivity.

This book brings together work on Turkish natural language and speech processing over the last 25 years, covering numerous fundamental tasks ranging from morphological processing and language modeling, to full-fledged deep parsing and machine translation, as well as computational resources developed along the way to enable most of this work. Owing to its complex morphology and free constituent order, Turkish has proved to be a fascinating language for natural language and speech processing research and applications. After an overview of the aspects of Turkish that make it challenging for natural language and speech processing tasks, this book discusses in detail the main tasks and applications of Turkish natural language and speech processing. A compendium of the work on Turkish natural language and speech processing, it is a valuable reference for new researchers considering computational work on Turkish, as well as a one-stop resource for commercial and research institutions planning to develop applications for Turkish. It also serves as a blueprint for similar work on other Turkic languages such as Azeri, Turkmen and Uzbek.

This book gathers outstanding research papers presented at the 5th International Joint Conference on Advances in Computational Intelligence (IJCACI 2021), held online during October 23-24, 2021. IJCACI 2021 is jointly organized by Jahangirnagar University (JU), Bangladesh, and South Asian University (SAU), India. The book presents the novel contributions in areas of computational intelligence and it serves as a reference material for advance research. The topics covered are collective intelligence, soft computing, optimization, cloud computing, machine learning, intelligent software, robotics, data science, data security, big data analytics, and signal and natural language processing.

This book gathers outstanding research papers presented in the 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Advances and Application (ICAIAA 2021), held in Poornima College of Engineering, Jaipur, India during 27-28 March 2021. This book covers research works carried out by various students such as bachelor, master and doctoral scholars, faculty and industry persons in the area of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning applications in healthcare, agriculture, business, security, etc. It will also cover research in core concepts of computer networks, intelligent system design and deployment, real time systems, WSN, sensors and sensor nodes, SDN, NFV, etc.

The proceedings includes cutting-edge research articles from the Fourth International Conference on Signal and Image Processing (ICSIP), which is organised by Dr. N.G.P. Institute of Technology, Kalapatti, Coimbatore. The Conference provides academia and industry to discuss and present the latest technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and application of signal, image and video processing. The book provides latest and most informative content from engineers and scientists in signal, image and video processing from around the world, which will benefit the future research community to work in a more cohesive and collaborative way.

The proceedings includes cutting-edge research articles from the Fourth International Conference on Signal and Image Processing (ICSIP), which is organised by Dr. N.G.P. Institute of Technology, Kalapatti, Coimbatore. The Conference provides academia and industry to discuss and present the latest technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and application of signal, image and video processing. The book provides latest and most informative content from engineers and scientists in signal, image and video processing from around the world, which will benefit the future research community to work in a more cohesive and collaborative way.

This book focuses on grammatical inference, presenting classic and modern methods of grammatical inference from the perspective of practitioners. To do so, it employs the Python programming language to present all of the methods discussed. Grammatical inference is a field that lies at the intersection of multiple disciplines, with contributions from computational linguistics, pattern recognition, machine learning, computational biology, formal learning theory and many others. Though the book is largely practical, it also includes elements of learning theory, combinatorics on words, the theory of automata and formal languages, plus references to real-world problems. The listings presented here can be directly copied and pasted into other programs, thus making the book a valuable source of ready recipes for students, academic researchers, and programmers alike, as well as an inspiration for their further development.>

This book focuses on dialog from a varied combination of fields: Linguistics, Philosophy of Language and Computation. It builds on the hypothesis that meaning in human communication arises at the discourse level rather than at the word level. The book offers a complex analytical framework and integration of the central areas of research around human communication. The content revolves around meaning but it also gives evidence of the connection among different points of view. Besides discussing issues of general interest to the field, the book triggers theoretical argumentation that is currently under scientific discussion. It examines such topics as immanent reasoning joined with Recanati's lekta and free enrichment, challenges of internet conversation, inner dialogs, cognition and language, and the relation between assertion and denial. It proposes a dialogical framework for intra-negotiation and gives a geolinguistic perspective on spoken discourse. Finally, it examines dialog and abduction and sheds light on a generation of dialog contexts by means of multimodal logic applied to speech acts.

This book presents four approaches to jointly training bidirectional neural machine translation (NMT) models. First, in order to improve the accuracy of the attention mechanism, it proposes an agreement-based joint training approach to help the two complementary models agree on word alignment matrices for the same training data. Second, it presents a semi-supervised approach that uses an autoencoder to reconstruct monolingual corpora, so as to incorporate these corpora into neural machine translation. It then introduces a joint training algorithm for pivot-based neural machine translation, which can be used to mitigate the data scarcity problem. Lastly it describes an end-to-end bidirectional NMT model to connect the source-to-target and target-to-source translation models, allowing the interaction of parameters between these two directional models.