Speech and language technologies continue to grow in importance as they are used to create natural and efficient interfaces between people and machines, and to automatically transcribe, extract, analyze, and route information from high-volume streams of spoken and written information. The workshops on Mathematical Foundations of Speech Processing and Natural Language Modeling were held in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Minnesota's NSF-sponsored Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, as part of a "Mathematics in Multimedia" year-long program. Each workshop brought together researchers in the respective technologies on the one hand, and mathematicians and statisticians on the other hand, for an intensive week of cross-fertilization. There is a long history of benefit from introducing mathematical techniques and ideas to speech and language technologies. Examples include the source-channel paradigm, hidden Markov models, decision trees, exponential models and formal languages theory. It is likely that new mathematical techniques, or novel applications of existing techniques, will once again prove pivotal for moving the field forward. This volume consists of original contributions presented by participants during the two workshops. Topics include language modeling, prosody, acoustic-phonetic modeling, and statistical methodology.

The description, automatic identification and further processing of web genres is a novel field of research in computational linguistics, NLP and related areas such as text-technology, digital humanities and web mining. One of the driving forces behind this research is the idea of genre-enabled search engines which enable users to additionally specify web genres that the documents to be retrieved should comply with (e.g., personal homepage, weblog, scientific article etc.). This book offers a thorough foundation of this upcoming field of research on web genres and document types in web-based social networking. It provides theoretical foundations of web genres, presents corpus linguistic approaches to their analysis and computational models for their classification. This includes research in the areas of web genre identification, web genre modelling and related fields such as genres and registers in web based communication social software-based document networks web genre ontologies and classification schemes text-technological models of web genres web content, structure and usage mining web genre classification web as corpus. The book addresses researchers who want to become acquainted with theoretical developments, computational models and their empirical evaluation in this field of research. It also addresses researchers who are interested in standards for the creation of corpora of web documents. Thus, the book concerns readers from many disciplines such as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, text-technology and computer science.

L systems are language-theoretic models for developmental biology. They wereintroduced in 1968 by Aristid Lindenmayer (1925-1989) and have proved to be among the most beautiful examples of interdisciplinary science, where work in one area induces fruitful ideas and results in other areas. L systemsare based on relational and set-theoretic concepts, which are more suitable for the discrete and combinatorial structures of biology than mathematical models based on calculus or statistics. L systems have stimulated new work not only in the realistic simulation of developing organisms but also in the theory of automata and formal languages, formal power series, computer graphics, and combinatorics of words. This book contains research papers by almost all leading authorities and by many of the most promising young researchers in the field. The 28 contributions are organized in sections on basic L systems, computer graphics, graph grammars and map L systems, biological aspects and models, and variations and generalizations of L systems. The introductory paper by Lindenmayer and J}rgensen was written for a wide audience and is accessible to the non-specialist reader. The volume documents the state of the art in the theory of L systems and their applications. It will interest researchers and advanced students in theoretical computer science and developmental biology as well as professionals in computer graphics.

Berkeley's philosophy has been much studied and discussed over the years, and a growing number of scholars have come to the realization that scientific and mathematical writings are an essential part of his philosophical enterprise. The aim of this volume is to present Berkeley's two most important scientific texts in a form which meets contemporary standards of scholarship while rendering them accessible to the modern reader. Although editions of both are contained in the fourth volume of the Works, these lack adequate introductions and do not provide com plete and corrected texts. The present edition contains a complete and critically established text of both De Motu and The Analyst, in addi tion to a new translation of De Motu. The introductions and notes are designed to provide the background necessary for a full understanding of Berkeley's account of science and mathematics. Although these two texts are very different, they are united by a shared a concern with the work of Newton and Leibniz. Berkeley's De Motu deals extensively with Newton's Principia and Leibniz's Specimen Dynamicum, while The Analyst critiques both Leibnizian and Newto nian mathematics. Berkeley is commonly thought of as a successor to Locke or Malebranche, but as these works show he is also a successor to Newton and Leibniz."

This book is the final result of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop 'Interactive Learning Technology for the Deaf' , which was held between June 4 -7, 1991, in Sint-Michielsgestel, the Netherlands. The scientific organizing committee consisted of Frans Coninx (director), Ben Elsendoorn, Richard Foulds and Christopher Jones. The idea for this workshop originated from the observation that interactive learning technology seemed to be very promising in that it might help improve education of deaf children, but also from the given fact that general achievements in helping deaf children to acquire language could still be improved. Before this workshop, results on research in the areas of (sign) language acquistion and education of deaf children, improvement of speech produc tion and listening skills, as well as the use of interactive learning technol ogy, could be gathered in journals and at congresses. However, no meeting was ever organised where experts from these different fields were present at the same time. The aim of the workshop was to bring together experts in the fields of deaf education as well as interactive learning technology, to construct a multi disciplinary platform where ideas and research results could be discussed from various angles and which would serve as a jumping-board for future collaboration. We thought it essential that specialists from various direc tions in deaf education -i.e. bilingual, oral, and Total Communication (TC) approaches -were present, to contribute to the multi-displinary character of the workshop.

Databaseprogrammingis the process ofdeveloping data-intensiveapplications which demand the access to large amounts of structured, persistent data. The primary tool required for implementing such applications is a database programming language, namely aformal language which is specialized in the definition and manipulationof relevant large-scale data. As such, a database programming language is expected to provide high-level data modeling capabilitiesas well as avarietyofconstructs which facilitatethehandlingofthespecifieddata. Inthis perspective, the aim of this book is: (i) to present the recent advances in database technologyfrom theviewpointofthe novel database paradigmsproposedfor the developmentofadvanced, non-standard, data-intensive applications, (ii) to focus specificallyon the relational approach, with considerableemphasis on the extensions proposed in the last decade, and (iii) to describe the extended relational database languageAlgres which is primarily the outcome of research work conducted by the authorsincooperationwithalargenumberofothercolleaguesandstudents. Furthermore, in orderto put the concepts presented in the book into practice, the reader is invited to experiment with the Algres system, afree copyofwhich can be requestedfromKluwerAcademicPublishers,ordirectlyfromtheauthors. Dependingonthespecific interest andbackgroundofthereader,thebookcanserve either:(1) to overview recent trends in databases, (2) to introduce in more detail the concepts and theory of the nested relational model, or (3) to present a complete advancedrelationallanguagewhichcanbefreelyusedforexperimentalpurposeswithin academicandresearchframeworks.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second and Third Workshops of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, FIRE 2010 and 2011, on Multi-lingual Information Access in South Asian Languages held in Gandhinagar, India, in February 2010 and in Bombay, India, in December 2011. The volume brings together revised and expanded versions of a total of 29 papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on various aspects of multi-lingual information access.

The advent of the World Wide Web has changed the perspectives of groupware systems. The interest and deployment of Internet and intranet groupware solutions is growing rapidly, not just in academic circles but also in the commercial arena. The first generation of Web-based groupware tools has already started to emerge, and leading groupware vendors are urgently adapting their products for compatibility and integration with Web technologies. The focus of Groupware and the World Wide Web is to explore the potential for Web-based groupware. This book includes an analysis of the key characteristics of the Web, presenting reasons for its success, and describes developments of a diverse range of Web-based groupware systems. An emphasis on the technical obstacles and challenges is implemented by more analytical discussions and perspectives, including that of Information Technology managers looking to deploy groupware solutions within their organizations. Written by experts from different backgrounds - academic and commercial, technical and organizational - this book provides a unique overview of and insight into current issues and future possibilities concerning extension of the World Wide Web for group working.

Automatic learning is a complex, multidisciplinary field of research and development, involving theoretical and applied methods from statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology and psychology. Its applications to engineering problems, such as those encountered in electrical power systems, are therefore challenging, while extremely promising. More and more data have become available, collected from the field by systematic archiving, or generated through computer-based simulation. To handle this explosion of data, automatic learning can be used to provide systematic approaches, without which the increasing data amounts and computer power would be of little use. Automatic Learning Techniques in Power Systems is dedicated to the practical application of automatic learning to power systems. Power systems to which automatic learning can be applied are screened and the complementary aspects of automatic learning, with respect to analytical methods and numerical simulation, are investigated. This book presents a representative subset of automatic learning methods - basic and more sophisticated ones - available from statistics (both classical and modern), and from artificial intelligence (both hard and soft computing). The text also discusses appropriate methodologies for combining these methods to make the best use of available data in the context of real-life problems. Automatic Learning Techniques in Power Systems is a useful reference source for professionals and researchers developing automatic learning systems in the electrical power field.

Stochastically-Based Semantic Analysis investigates the problem of automatic natural language understanding in a spoken language dialog system. The focus is on the design of a stochastic parser and its evaluation with respect to a conventional rule-based method. Stochastically-Based Semantic Analysis will be of most interest to researchers in artificial intelligence, especially those in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition. It will also appeal to practicing engineers who work in the area of interactive speech systems.

Although there has been much progress in developing theories, models and systems in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Vision Processing (VP) there has heretofore been little progress on integrating these subareas of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This book contains a set of edited papers addressing computational models and systems for the integration of NLP and VP. The papers focus on site descriptions such as that of the large Japanese $500 million Real World Computing (RWC) project, on historical philosophical issues, on systems which have been built and which integrate the processing of visual scenes together with language about them, and on spatial relations which appear to be the key to integration. The U.S.A., Japan and the EU are well reflected, showing up the fact that integration is a truly international issue. There is no doubt that all of this will be necessary for the InformationSuperHighways of the future.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Ibero-American Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IBERAMIA 2012, held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, in November 2012. The 75 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 170 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, information and knowledge processing, knowledge discovery and data mining, machine learning, bio-inspired computing, fuzzy systems, modelling and simulation, ambient intelligence, multi-agent systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, computer vision and robotics, planning and scheduling, AI in education, and knowledge engineering and applications.

Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures deals with information hiding. With the proliferation of multimedia on the Internet, information hiding addresses two areas of concern: privacy of information from surveillance (steganography) and protection of intellectual property (digital watermarking). Steganography (literally, covered writing) explores methods to hide the existence of hidden messages. These methods include invisible ink, microdot, digital signature, covert channel, and spread spectrum communication. Digital watermarks represent a commercial application of steganography. Watermarks can be used to track the copyright and ownership of electronic media. In this volume, the authors focus on techniques for hiding information in digital media. They analyze the hiding techniques to uncover their limitations. These limitations are employed to devise attacks against hidden information. The goal of these attacks is to expose the existence of a secret message or render a digital watermark unusable. In assessing these attacks, countermeasures are developed to assist in protecting digital watermarking systems.Understanding the limitations of the current methods will lead us to build more robust methods that can survive various manipulation and attacks. The more information that is placed in the public's reach on the Internet, the more owners of such information need to protect themselves from theft and false representation. Systems to analyze techniques for uncovering hidden information and recover seemingly destroyed information will be useful to law enforcement authorities in computer forensics and digital traffic analysis. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking - Attacks and Countermeasures presents the authors' research contributions in three fundamental areas with respect to image-based steganography and watermarking: analysis of data hiding techniques, attacks against hidden information, and countermeasures to attacks against digital watermarks. Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking -- Attacks and Countermeasures is suitable for a secondary text in a graduate level course, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

Speech--to--Speech Translation: a Massively Parallel Memory-Based Approach describes one of the world's first successful speech--to--speech machine translation systems. This system accepts speaker-independent continuous speech, and produces translations as audio output. Subsequent versions of this machine translation system have been implemented on several massively parallel computers, and these systems have attained translation performance in the milliseconds range. The success of this project triggered several massively parallel projects, as well as other massively parallel artificial intelligence projects throughout the world. Dr. Hiroaki Kitano received the distinguished 'Computers and Thought Award' from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in 1993 for his work in this area, and that work is reported in this book.

This book constitutes the refereed selected papers from the 14th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2013, held in Zhengzhou, China, in May 2013. The 68 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. They are organized in topical sections covering all major topics of lexical semantics; lexical resources; corpus linguistics and applications on natural language processing.

Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime discusses how the HyTime standard can be applied to real world problems of navigating from here to there in collections of documents. The HyTime standard itself provides enabling method and templates for various information structures such as links and various kinds of location indicators. A HyTime application specifies how a group applies those templates to their particular requirements. This involves choosing which HyTime structures are needed, setting up conventions for how they are to be used and setting up management and processes for creation, conversion and update of hypermedia documents. A HyTime engine is the last ingredient: actually using an application typically involves choosing software to support one's use of HyTime and customizing it as needed. This may be as simple as setting up hypertextual style sheets that determine how links and other things look and act. More specialized applications may require full-scale design and programming. Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime presents the first in-depth guide to the HyTime specifications, both describing its key features and providing guidelines on how it is used. The book begins with the more familiar structures of books, graphics and cross-references, detailing the HyTime constructs and models used to identify, locate, and link data. It goes on to introduce some of HyTime's mechanisms for linking multidimensional, multimedia data, and for scheduling it in space and time. The authors help the reader become fluent in HyTime as it applies to the simpler and most widely understood data types. After mastering this level of HyTime, readers will be ready and able to explore the exciting potential of HyTime for more sophisticated multimedia applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First CCF Conference, NLPCC 2012, held in Beijing, China, during October/November, 2012. The 43 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 151 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications on language computing; fundamentals on language computing; machine translation and multi-lingual information access; NLP for search, ads and social networks; question answering and Web mining.

Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Workshop on Cross-Linguistic Information Retrieval that was held August 22, 1996 dur ing the SIGIR'96 Conference. Alan Smeaton of Dublin University and Paraic Sheridan of the ETH, Zurich, were the two other members of the Scientific Committee for this workshop. SIGIR is the Association for Computing Ma chinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, and they have held conferences yearly since 1977. Three additional papers have been added: Chapter 4 Distributed Cross-Lingual Information retrieval describes the EMIR retrieval system, one of the first general cross-language systems to be implemented and evaluated; Chapter 6 Mapping Vocabularies Using Latent Semantic Indexing, which originally appeared as a technical report in the Lab oratory for Computational Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, is included here because it was one of the earliest, though hard-to-find, publi cations showing the application of Latent Semantic Indexing to the problem of cross-language retrieval; and Chapter 10 A Weighted Boolean Model for Cross Language Text Retrieval describes a recent approach to solving the translation term weighting problem, specific to Cross-Language Information Retrieval. Gregory Grefenstette CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Ballesteros David Hull W, Bruce Croft Gregory Grefenstette Center for Intelligent Xerox Research Centre Europe Information Retrieval Grenoble Laboratory Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Thomas K. Landauer Department of Psychology Mark W. Davis and Institute of Cognitive Science Computing Research Lab University of Colorado, Boulder New Mexico State University Michael L. Littman Bonnie J.

These two volumes consIstmg of Foundations and Applications provide the current status of theoretical and empirical developments in "computing with words." In philosophy, the twentieth century is said to be the century of language. This is mainly due to Wittgenstein who said: "The meaning of a word is its use in the language game." "The concept game is a concept with blurred edges." In the first phrase, "the language game" implies the everyday human activity with language, and in the latter, "game" simply implies an ordinary word. Thus, Wittgenstein precisely stated that a word is fuzzy in real life. Unfortunately this idea about a word was not accepted in the conventional science. We had to wait for Zadeh's fuzzy sets theory. Remembering Wittgenstein's statement, we should consider, on the one hand, the concept of "computing with words" from a philosophical point of view. It deeply relates to the everyday use of a word in which the meaning of a word is fuzzy in its nature.

Motivation Modem enterprises rely on database management systems (DBMS) to collect, store and manage corporate data, which is considered a strategic corporate re source. Recently, with the proliferation of personal computers and departmen tal computing, the trend has been towards the decentralization and distribution of the computing infrastructure, with autonomy and responsibility for data now residing at the departmental and workgroup level of the organization. Users want their data delivered to their desktops, allowing them to incor porate data into their personal databases, spreadsheets, word processing doc uments, and most importantly, into their daily tasks and activities. They want to be able to share their information while retaining control over its access and distribution. There are also pressures from corporate leaders who wish to use information technology as a strategic resource in offering specialized value-added services to customers. Database technology is being used to manage the data associated with corporate processes and activities. Increasingly, the data being managed are not simply formatted tables in relational databases, but all types of ob jects, including unstructured text, images, audio, and video. Thus, the database management providers are being asked to extend the capabilities of DBMS to include object-relational models as well as full object-oriented database man agement systems.

Representations of humans in virtual environments are called Avatars. This book brings together work from a variety of relevant disciplines to detail how humans interact in computer-generated environments. It contains contributions from several key people in the field, including Microsoft Researchs Virtual World Group, and presents their findings in a way that is accessible to readers who are new to the field. Coverage details Internet-based virtual worlds that have been widely used by the public as well as networked VR systems that have been primarily used in pilot studies and research.

Although there has been much progress in developing theories, models and systems in the areas of natural language processing (NLP) and vision processing (VP), there has hitherto been little progress in integrating these two subareas of artificial intelligence. The papers in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing focus on site descriptions, such as the work at Apple Computer, California, and the DFKI, Saarbrucken, on historical surveys and philosophical issues, on systems that have been built, enabling communication through text, speech, sound, touch, video, graphics and icons, and on the automatic presentation of information, whether it be in the form of instruction manuals, statistical data or visualisation of language. There is also a review of Mark Maybury's book Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces. Audience: Vital reading for all interested in the SuperInformationHighways of the future.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2013, held in Chongqing, China, during November 2013. The 31 revised full papers presented together with three keynote talks and 13 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 203 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fundamentals on language computing; applications on language computing; machine learning for NLP; machine translation and multi-lingual information access; NLP for social media and web mining, knowledge acquisition; NLP for search technology and ads; NLP fundamentals; NLP applications; NLP for social media.

Networks of Learning Automata: Techniques for Online Stochastic Optimization is a comprehensive account of learning automata models with emphasis on multiautomata systems. It considers synthesis of complex learning structures from simple building blocks and uses stochastic algorithms for refining probabilities of selecting actions. Mathematical analysis of the behavior of games and feedforward networks is provided. Algorithms considered here can be used for online optimization of systems based on noisy measurements of performance index. Also, algorithms that assure convergence to the global optimum are presented. Parallel operation of automata systems for improving speed of convergence is described. The authors also include extensive discussion of how learning automata solutions can be constructed in a variety of applications.

Geometric properties and relations play central roles in the description and processing of spatial data. The properties and relations studied by mathematicians usually have precise definitions, but verbal descriptions often involve imprecisely defined concepts such as elongatedness or proximity. The methods used in soft computing provide a framework for formulating and manipulating such concepts. This volume contains eight papers on the soft definition and manipulation of spatial relations and gives a comprehensive summary on the subject.