In this book common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques is exploited on two common sense knowledge bases to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data.

"Cognitive and Computational Strategies for Word Sense Disambiguation" examines cognitive strategies by humans and computational strategies by machines, for WSD in parallel.
Focusing on a psychologically valid property of words and senses, author Oi Yee Kwongdiscusses their concreteness or abstractness and draws on psycholinguistic data to examine the extent to which existing lexical resources resemble the mental lexicon as far as the concreteness distinction is concerned. The text also investigates the contribution of different knowledge sources to WSD in relation to this very intrinsic nature of words and senses."

Formal Languages and Applications provides a comprehensive study-aid and self-tutorial for graduates students and researchers. The main results and techniques are presented in an readily accessible manner and accompanied by many references and directions for further research. This carefully edited monograph is intended to be the gateway to formal language theory and its applications, so it is very useful as a review and reference source of information in formal language theory.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2012, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in August 2012. The 12 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on CNL for knowledge representation, CNL for interactive systems, CNL applications, CNL grammars and lexica, CNL in the context of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data and CNL use cases.

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 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 book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, held in Groningen, The Netherlands, in June 2012. The 12 full papers, 24 short papers and 16 poster papers presented in this volume together with a full-paper length invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The rapidly evolving state-of-the-art in NLP and the shifting interest to appcliations targeting document and data collections available on the Web, including an increasing amount of user generated content, is reflected in the contributions to this book. Topics covered are information retrieval, text classification and clustering, summarization, normalization of user generated content, "forensic" NLP, ontologies and natural language, sentiment analysis, question answering and information extraction, terminology and named entity recognition, and NLP tools development.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2010, held in Marettimo Island, Italy, in September 2010. The 9 revised papers presented in this volume, together with 1 tutorial, were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 initial submissions. They broadly cover the field of controlled natural language, stressing theoretical and practical aspects of CNLs, relations to other knowledge representation languages, tool support, 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 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 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.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL 2012, held in Nantes, France, in July 2012. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on logical foundation of syntactic formalisms, logics for semantics of lexical items, sentences, discourse and dialog, applications of these models to natural language processing, type theoretic, proof theoretic, model theoretic and other logically based formal methods for describing natural language syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as the implementation of natural language processing software relying on such methods.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online. Table of Contents: Preface / Sentiment Analysis: A Fascinating Problem / The Problem of Sentiment Analysis / Document Sentiment Classification / Sentence Subjectivity and Sentiment Classification / Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis / Sentiment Lexicon Generation / Opinion Summarization / Analysis of Comparative Opinions / Opinion Search and Retrieval / Opinion Spam Detection / Quality of Reviews / Concluding Remarks / Bibliography / Author Biography

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2012, held in Toronto, Canada, in May 2012. The 23 regular papers, 16 short papers, and 4 papers from the Graduate Student Symposium presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The papers cover a broad range of topics presenting original work in all areas of artificial intelligence, either theoretical or applied.

The general markup language XML has played an outstanding role in the mul- ple ways of processing electronic documents, XML being used either in the design of interface structures or as a formal framework for the representation of structure or content-related properties of documents. This book in its 13 chapters discusses aspects of XML-based linguistic information modeling combining: methodological issues, especially with respect to text-related information modeling, applicati- oriented research and issues of formal foundations. The contributions in this book are based on current research in Text Technology, Computational Linguistics and in the international domain of evolving standards for language resources. Rec- rent themes in this book are markup languages, explored from different points of view, and topics of text-related information modeling. These topics have been core areas of the research Unit "Text-technological Information Modeling" (www. te- technology. de) funded from 2002 to 2009 by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Positions developed in this book could also bene t from the presentations and discussion at the conference "Modelling Linguistic Information Resources" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Zentrum fur .. interdisziplinare .. Forschung, ZiF) at Bielefeld, a center for advanced studies known for its international and interdisciplinary meetings and research. The editors would like to thank the DFG and ZiF for their nancial support, the publisher, the series editors, the reviewers and those people that helped to prepare the manuscript, especially Carolin Kram, Nils Diewald, Jens Stegmann and Peter M. Fischer and last but not least, all of the authors.

"Predicting Prosody from Text for Text-to-Speech Synthesis"covers thespecific aspects of prosody, mainly focusing on how to predict the prosodic information from linguistic text, and then how to exploit the predicted prosodic knowledge for various speech applications. Author K. Sreenivasa Rao discusses proposed methods along with state-of-the-art techniques for the acquisition and incorporation of prosodic knowledge for developing speech systems.

Positional, contextual and phonological features are proposed for representing the linguistic and production constraints of the sound units present in the text. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers working in the area of speech processing."

Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity: A Case Study discusses the subject of forensic voice identification and speaker profiling. Specifically focusing on speaker profiling and using dialects of the Hindi language, widely used in India, the authors have contributed to the body of research on speaker identification by using accent feature as the discriminating factor. This case study contributes to the understanding of the speaker identification process in a situation where unknown speech samples are in different language/dialect than the recording of a suspect. The authors' data establishes that vowel quality, quantity, intonation and tone of a speaker as compared to Khariboli (standard Hindi) could be the potential features for identification of dialect accent.

Entropy Guided Transformation Learning: Algorithms and Applications (ETL) presents a machine learning algorithm for classification tasks. ETL generalizes Transformation Based Learning (TBL) by solving the TBL bottleneck: the construction of good template sets. ETL automatically generates templates using Decision Tree decomposition.

The authors describe ETL Committee, an ensemble method that uses ETL as the base learner. Experimental results show that ETL Committee improves the effectiveness of ETL classifiers. The application of ETL is presented to four Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks: part-of-speech tagging, phrase chunking, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ETL is an effective way to learn accurate transformation rules, and shows better results than TBL with handcrafted templates for the four tasks. By avoiding the use of handcrafted templates, ETL enables the use of transformation rules to a greater range of tasks.

Suitable for both advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, Entropy Guided Transformation Learning: Algorithms and Applications provides a comprehensive introduction to ETL and its NLP applications.

Text classification is becoming a crucial task to analysts in different areas. In the last few decades, the production of textual documents in digital form has increased exponentially. Their applications range from web pages to scientific documents, including emails, news and books. Despite the widespread use of digital texts, handling them is inherently difficult - the large amount of data necessary to represent them and the subjectivity of classification complicate matters. This book gives a concise view on how to use kernel approaches for inductive inference in large scale text classification; it presents a series of new techniques to enhance, scale and distribute text classification tasks. It is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of the whole field of text classification. Its purpose is less ambitious and more practical: to explain and illustrate some of the important methods used in this field, in particular kernel approaches and techniques.

Current access paradigms for the Web, i.e., direct access via search engines or database queries and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been criticized because they are too rigid or simplistic to effectively cope with a large number of practical search applications. A third paradigm, dynamic taxonomies and faceted search, focuses on user-centered conceptual exploration, which is far more frequent in search tasks than retrieval using exact specification, and has rapidly become pervasive in modern Web data retrieval, especially in critical applications such as product selection for e-commerce. It is a heavily interdisciplinary area, where data modeling, human factors, logic, inference, and efficient implementations must be dealt with holistically. Sacco, Tzitzikas, and their contributors provide a coherent roadmap to dynamic taxonomies and faceted search. The individual chapters, written by experts in each relevant field and carefully integrated by the editors, detail aspects like modeling, schema design, system implementation, search performance, and user interaction. The basic concepts of each area are introduced, and advanced topics and recent research are highlighted. An additional chapter is completely devoted to current and emerging application areas, including e-commerce, multimedia, multidimensional file systems, and geographical information systems. The presentation targets advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers from different areas - from computer science to library and information science - as well as advanced practitioners. Given that research results are currently scattered among very different publications, this volume will allow researchers to get a coherent and comprehensive picture of the state of the art.

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

Peter Flynn has been an enthusiastic and skillful contributor in the world of SGML and XML for many years, and it is a pleasure to see him set some of his expertise down in writing as well. The range and power of SGML tools have taken a sharp upward turn: the first step leading to this was that the Web came along with HTML, and showed the whole world that pointy brackets and (at least somewhat) descriptive markup could make a difference. Soon afterward, 'HTML claustrophobia' began to grow and XML came to the rescue. Since XML is fundamentally an elegant subset of SGML that reduces complexity without reducing functionality, the movement to XML is great for SGML too. The massive interest in XML is bringing forth a huge variety of new, faster, more powerful, and cheaper software tools. Peter has caught the cusp of this change and shows in detail how SGML and XML tools fit together into integrated solutions that return value for your investment in structured information.

The explosion of information technology has led to substantial growth of web-accessible linguistic data in terms of quantity, diversity and complexity. These resources become even more useful when interlinked with each other to generate network effects.

The general trend of providing data online is thus accompanied by newly developing methodologies to interconnect linguistic data and metadata. This includes linguistic data collections, general-purpose knowledge bases (e.g., the DBpedia, a machine-readable edition of the Wikipedia), and repositories with specific information about languages, linguistic categories and phenomena. The Linked Data paradigm provides a framework for interoperability and access management, and thereby allows to integrate information from such a diverse set of resources.

The contributions assembled in this volume illustrate the band-width of applications of the Linked Data paradigm for representative types of language resources. They cover lexical-semantic resources, annotated corpora, typological databases as well as terminology and metadata repositories. The book includes representative applications from diverse fields, ranging from academic linguistics (e.g., typology and corpus linguistics) over applied linguistics (e.g., lexicography and translation studies) to technical applications (in computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing and information technology).

This volume accompanies the Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics 2012 (LDL-2012) in Frankfurt/M., Germany, organized by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). It assembles contributions of the workshop participants and, beyond this, it summarizes initial steps in the formation of a Linked Open Data cloud of linguistic resources, the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud (LLOD).