This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCL 2018, and the 6th International Symposium on Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data, NLP-NABD 2018, held in Changsha, China, in October 2018. The 33 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: Semantics; machine translation; knowledge graph and information extraction; linguistic resource annotation and evaluation; information retrieval and question answering; text classification and summarization; social computing and sentiment analysis; and NLP applications.

The two-volume set LNCS 10761 + 10762 constitutes revised selected papers from the CICLing 2017 conference which took place in Budapest, Hungary, in April 2017. The total of 90 papers presented in the two volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. In addition, the proceedings contain 4 invited papers. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Part I: general; morphology and text segmentation; syntax and parsing; word sense disambiguation; reference and coreference resolution; named entity recognition; semantics and text similarity; information extraction; speech recognition; applications to linguistics and the humanities. Part II: sentiment analysis; opinion mining; author profiling and authorship attribution; social network analysis; machine translation; text summarization; information retrieval and text classification; practical applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th Joint International Semantic Technology Conference, JIST 2018, held in Awaji, Japan, in November 2018. The 23 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. They present applications of semantic technologies, theoretical results, new algorithms and tools to facilitate the adoption of semantic technologies and are organized in topical sections on knowledge graphs; data management; question answering and NLP; ontology and reasoning; government open data; and semantic web for life sciences.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Health Information Science, HIS 2018, held in Cairns, QLD, Australia, in October 2018. The 13 full papers and 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers feature multidisciplinary research results in health information science and systems that support health information management and health service delivery. They relate to all aspects of the conference scope, such as medical/health/biomedicine information resources such as patient medical records, devices and equipments, software and tools to capture, store, retrieve, process, analyze, and optimize the use of information in the health domain; data management, data mining, and knowledge discovery, management of public health, examination of standards, privacy and security issues; computer visualization and artificial intelligence for computer aided diagnosis; development of new architectures and applications for health information systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2018, held in Porto, Portugal, in September 2018. The 51 full papers, 17 short papers, and 13 poster and tutorial papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The general theme of TPDL 2018 was Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge. The papers present a wide range of the following topics: Metadata, Entity Disambiguation, Data Management, Scholarly Communication, Digital Humanities, User Interaction, Resources, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, Recommendation.

The two-volume set LNCS 10761 + 10762 constitutes revised selected papers from the CICLing 2017 conference which took place in Budapest, Hungary, in April 2017. The total of 90 papers presented in the two volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. In addition, the proceedings contain 4 invited papers. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Part I: general; morphology and text segmentation; syntax and parsing; word sense disambiguation; reference and coreference resolution; named entity recognition; semantics and text similarity; information extraction; speech recognition; applications to linguistics and the humanities. Part II: sentiment analysis; opinion mining; author profiling and authorship attribution; social network analysis; machine translation; text summarization; information retrieval and text classification; practical applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2018, held in Canela, RS, Brazil, in September 2018. The 42 full papers, 3 short papers and 4 other papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: Corpus Linguistics, Information Extraction, LanguageApplications, Language Resources, Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, Speech Processing, and Syntax and Parsing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IAPR TC3 International Workshop on Artificial Neural Networks in Pattern Recognition, ANNPR 2018, held in Siena, Italy, in September 2018. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The papers present and discuss the latest research in all areas of neural network- and machine learning-based pattern recognition. They are organized in two sections: learning algorithms and architectures, and applications. Chapter "Bounded Rational Decision-Making with Adaptive Neural Network Priors" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Applications, AIMSA 2018, held in Varna, Bulgaria, in September 2018. The 22 revised full papers and 7 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. They cover a wide range of topics in AI: from machine learning to natural language systems, from information extraction to text mining, from knowledge representation to soft computing; from theoretical issues to real-world applications.

This book presents techniques for audio search, aimed to retrieve information from massive speech databases by using audio query words. The authors examine different features, techniques and evaluation measures attempted by researchers around the world. The topics covered also include available databases, software / tools, patents / copyrights, and different platforms for benchmarking. The content is relevant for developers, academics, and students.

Many applications within natural language processing involve performing text-to-text transformations, i.e., given a text in natural language as input, systems are required to produce a version of this text (e.g., a translation), also in natural language, as output. Automatically evaluating the output of such systems is an important component in developing text-to-text applications. Two approaches have been proposed for this problem: (i) to compare the system outputs against one or more reference outputs using string matching-based evaluation metrics and (ii) to build models based on human feedback to predict the quality of system outputs without reference texts. Despite their popularity, reference-based evaluation metrics are faced with the challenge that multiple good (and bad) quality outputs can be produced by text-to-text approaches for the same input. This variation is very hard to capture, even with multiple reference texts. In addition, reference-based metrics cannot be used in production (e.g., online machine translation systems), when systems are expected to produce outputs for any unseen input. In this book, we focus on the second set of metrics, so-called Quality Estimation (QE) metrics, where the goal is to provide an estimate on how good or reliable the texts produced by an application are without access to gold-standard outputs. QE enables different types of evaluation that can target different types of users and applications. Machine learning techniques are used to build QE models with various types of quality labels and explicit features or learnt representations, which can then predict the quality of unseen system outputs. This book describes the topic of QE for text-to-text applications, covering quality labels, features, algorithms, evaluation, uses, and state-of-the-art approaches. It focuses on machine translation as application, since this represents most of the QE work done to date. It also briefly describes QE for several other applications, including text simplification, text summarization, grammatical error correction, and natural language generation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2018, jointly organized by Avignon, Marseille and Toulon universities and held in Avignon, France, in September 2018. The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. Many papers tackle the medical ehealth and ehealth multimedia retrieval challenges, however there are many other topics of research such as document clustering, social biases in IR, social book search, personality profiling. Further this volume presents 9 "best of the labs" papers which were reviewed as a full paper submission with the same review criteria. The labs represented scientific challenges based on new data sets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access. In addition to this, 10 benchmarking labs reported results of their yearlong activities in overview talks and lab sessions. The papers address all aspects of information access in any modularity and language and cover a broad range of topics in the field of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation.

This two volume set of LNAI 11108 and LNAI 11109 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2018, held in Hohhot, China, in August 2018. The 55 full papers and 31 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 308 submissions. The papers of the first volume are organized in the following topics: conversational Bot/QA/IR; knowledge graph/IE; machine learning for NLP; machine translation; and NLP applications. The papers of the second volume are organized as follows: NLP for social network; NLP fundamentals; text mining; and short papers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Big Data, Cloud and Applications, BDCA 2018, held in Kenitra, Morocco, in April 2018.The 45 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully selected from 99 submissions with a thorough double-blind review process. They focus on the following topics: big data, cloud computing, machine learning, deep learning, data analysis, neural networks, information system and social media, image processing and applications, and natural language processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems, DB&IS 2018, held in Trakai, Lithuania, in July 2018. The 24 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. The papers are centered around topics like information systems engineering, enterprise information systems, business process management, knowledge representation, ontology engineering, systems security, information systems applications, database systems, machine learning, big data analysis, big data processing, cognitive computing.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2018, held in Tokyo, Japan, in September 2018. The 39 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 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-inspired computing; quantum computing.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Formal Grammar, FG 2018, collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in August 2018. The 7 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 11 submissions. The focus of papers are as follows: Formal and computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics Model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics Logical aspects of linguistic structure Constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar Learnability of formal grammar Integration of stochastic and symbolic models of grammar Foundational, methodological, and architectural issues in grammar and linguistics Mathematical foundations of statistical approaches to linguistic analysis

This two volume set of LNAI 11108 and LNAI 11109 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2018, held in Hohhot, China, in August 2018. The 55 full papers and 31 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 308 submissions. The papers of the first volume are organized in the following topics: conversational Bot/QA/IR; knowledge graph/IE; machine learning for NLP; machine translation; and NLP applications. The papers of the second volume are organized as follows: NLP for social network; NLP fundamentals; text mining; and short papers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Satellite Events of the 15th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2018, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in June 2018.The volume contains 41 poster and demonstration papers, 11 invited workshop papers, and 9 full papers, selected out of a total of 70 submissions. They deal with all areas of semantic web research, semantic technologies on the Web and Linked Data.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7h Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2015, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2015. The 31 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Speech Processing; Multiword Expressions; Parsing; Language Resources and Tools; Ontologies and Wordnets; Machine Translation; Information and Data Extraction; Text Engineering and Processing; Applications in Language Learning; Emotions, Decisions and Opinions; Less-Resourced Languages.

This book focuses on speech signal phenomena, presenting a robustification of the usual speech generation models with regard to the presumed types of excitation signals, which is equivalent to the introduction of a class of nonlinear models and the corresponding criterion functions for parameter estimation. Compared to the general class of nonlinear models, such as various neural networks, these models possess good properties of controlled complexity, the option of working in "online" mode, as well as a low information volume for efficient speech encoding and transmission. Providing comprehensive insights, the book is based on the authors' research, which has already been published, supplemented by additional texts discussing general considerations of speech modeling, linear predictive analysis and robust parameter estimation.

This book lays out a path leading from the linguistic and cognitive basics, to classical rule-based and machine learning algorithms, to today's state-of-the-art approaches, which use advanced empirically grounded techniques, automatic knowledge acquisition, and refined linguistic modeling to make a real difference in real-world applications. Anaphora and coreference resolution both refer to the process of linking textual phrases (and, consequently, the information attached to them) within as well as across sentence boundaries, and to the same discourse referent. The book offers an overview of recent research advances, focusing on practical, operational approaches and their applications. In part I (Background), it provides a general introduction, which succinctly summarizes the linguistic, cognitive, and computational foundations of anaphora processing and the key classical rule- and machine-learning-based anaphora resolution algorithms. Acknowledging the central importance of shared resources, part II (Resources) covers annotated corpora, formal evaluation, preprocessing technology, and off-the-shelf anaphora resolution systems. Part III (Algorithms) provides a thorough description of state-of-the-art anaphora resolution algorithms, covering enhanced machine learning methods as well as techniques for accomplishing important subtasks such as mention detection and acquisition of relevant knowledge. Part IV (Applications) deals with a selection of important anaphora and coreference resolution applications, discussing particular scenarios in diverse domains and distilling a best-practice model for systematically approaching new application cases. In the concluding part V (Outlook), based on a survey conducted among the contributing authors, the prospects of the research field of anaphora processing are discussed, and promising new areas of interdisciplinary cooperation and emerging application scenarios are identified. Given the book's design, it can be used both as an accompanying text for advanced lectures in computational linguistics, natural language engineering, and computer science, and as a reference work for research and independent study. It addresses an audience that includes academic researchers, university lecturers, postgraduate students, advanced undergraduate students, industrial researchers, and software engineers.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, ICIAR 2018, held in Povoa de Varzim, Portugal, in June 2018. The 91 full papers presented together with 15 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Enhancement, Restoration and Reconstruction, Image Segmentation, Detection, Classication and Recognition, Indexing and Retrieval, Computer Vision, Activity Recognition, Traffic and Surveillance, Applications, Biomedical Image Analysis, Diagnosis and Screening of Ophthalmic Diseases, and Challenge on Breast Cancer Histology Images.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2018, held in Montreal, QC, Canada, in June 2018. The 53 full papers and 33 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 146 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: constraint solving and optimization; data mining and knowledge discovery; evolutionary computation; expert systems and robotics; knowledge representation, machine learning; meta-heuristics; multi-agent systems; natural language processing; neural networks; planning, scheduling and spatial reasoning; rough sets, Internet of Things (IoT), ubiquitous computing and big data; data science, privacy, and security; inelligent systems approaches in information extraction; and artificial intelligence, law and justice.

This contributed volume explores the achievements gained and the remaining puzzling questions by applying dynamical systems theory to the linguistic inquiry. In particular, the book is divided into three parts, each one addressing one of the following topics: 1) Facing complexity in the right way: mathematics and complexity 2) Complexity and theory of language 3) From empirical observation to formal models: investigation of specific linguistic phenomena, like enunciation, deixis, or the meaning of the metaphorical phrases The application of complexity theory to describe cognitive phenomena is a recent and very promising trend in cognitive science. At the time when dynamical approaches triggered a paradigm shift in cognitive science some decade ago, the major topic of research were the challenges imposed by classical computational approaches dealing with the explanation of cognitive phenomena like consciousness, decision making and language. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate and post-graduate students who want to enter the field.