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 book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2013, held in Bangalore, India, in December 2013. The 15 revised full papers, 6 revised short papers and 10 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval; social architecture for digital libraries and information policy; digital library applications and systems; data mining for digital libraries; collaboration and communities; analysing social media and social networks; mobile devices and services; and metadata and information extraction.

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 Second International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2012 - the successor of the ECDL (European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries) - held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September 2012. The 23 full papers, 19 short papers, 15 posters and 8 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 139 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on user behavior, mobiles and place, heritage and sustainability, preservation, linked data, analysing and enriching documents, content and metadata quality, folksonomy and ontology, information retrieval, organising collections, as well as extracting and indexing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference, MTSR 2013, held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in November 2013. The 29 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. The papers are organized in several sessions and tracks. The sessions cover the following topics: platforms for research datasets, system architecture and data management; metadata and ontology validation, evaluation, mapping and interoperability; content management. The tracks cover the following topics: big data and digital libraries in health, science and technology; European and national projects and project networking; metadata and semantics for open repositories, research information systems and data infrastructures; metadata and semantics for cultural collections and applications; metadata and semantics for agriculture, food and environment.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2012, held in Rome, Italy, in September 2012. The 14 papers and 3 poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Furthermore, the books contains 2 keynote papers. The papers are organized in topical sections named: benchmarking and evaluation initiatives; information access; and evaluation methodologies and infrastructure.

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 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 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.

The SGML FAQ Book: Understanding the Foundation of HTML and XML is similar, but not quite the same kind of thing as an online FAQ or 'Frequently Asked Questions' list. It addresses questions from people who already actually use SGML in some way (including HTML authors), and people who are about to use it. It deals mainly with issues that arise when using SGML in practice. A very brief introduction to SGML is included as Appendix A. The questions discussed in The SGML FAQ Book are repeatedly heard by people who make their living serving the SGML community. SGML experts spend many hours teaching these details, sometimes repeatedly because some questions do not seem important - until you run into them. So one benefit of this book is learning more of the art of document creation and management, both by general reading before questions arise and by specific reference when a question arises. For the latter use, the appendices, glossary, and index are particularly important. A second benefit of this book is that it provides a common theme to its answers that you can apply in your use of SGML, HTML and related languages in general.The fundamental answer to many of the questions boils down to 'simplify': many questions do not show up if you use the simple, elegant core of SGML without worrying about optional features. The credo of this book is simply, 'SGML doesn't need to be complicated'. SGML has the potential for complexity at certain points. But much of the complexity comes from optional parts and can be avoided. SGML methodology and its primary benefits suffer no loss even if you skip many features, which speaks well for the quality of SGML's overall design. Many of the questions discussed involve those optional parts, and therefore can be avoided by judicious designers and authors. The two key goals of the book are (1) to answer questions that you may actually encounter as an SGML user, and to help you get 'unstuck' and be as productive as possible in using the language and (2) to show proactive ways you can simplify your use of SGML, and get its very substantial benefits with minimal complexity.

This book provides a theoretical and practical explanation of the latest advancements in information retrieval and their application to existing systems. It takes a system approach, discussing all aspects of an Information Retrieval System. The major difference between this book and the first edition is the addition to this text of descriptions of the automated indexing of multimedia documents, as items in information retrieval are now considered to be a combination of text along with graphics, audio, image and video data types. The growth of the Internet and the availability of enormous volumes of data in digital form have necessitated intense interest in techniques to assist the user in locating data. The importance of the Internet and its associated hypertext linked structure are put into perspective as a new type of information retrieval data structure. The total system approach also includes discussion of the human interface and the importance of information visualization for identification of relevant information.With the availability of large quantities of multi-media on the Internet (audio, video, images), Information Retrieval Systems need to address multi-modal retrieval. The primary use of this book is as a college text on Information Retrieval Systems. But in addition to the theoretical aspects, the book maintains a theme of practicality that puts into perspective the importance and utilization of the theory in systems that are being used by anyone on the Internet. The student will gain an understanding of what is achievable using existing technologies and deficient areas that warrant additional research. The text provides coverage of all of the major aspects of information retrieval and has sufficient detail to allow students to implement a simple Information Retrieval System.

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.

"Phonetic Search Methods for Large Databases" focuses on Keyword Spotting (KWS) within large speech databases. The brief will begin by outlining the challenges associated with Keyword Spotting within large speech databases using dynamic keyword vocabularies. It will then continue by highlighting the various market segments in need of KWS solutions, as well as, the specific requirements of each market segment. The work also includes a detailed description of the complexity of the task and the different methods that are used, including the advantages and disadvantages of each method and an in-depth comparison. The main focus will be on the Phonetic Search method and its efficient implementation. This will include a literature review of the various methods used for the efficient implementation of Phonetic Search Keyword Spotting, with an emphasis on the authors' own research which entails a comparative analysis of the Phonetic Search method which includes algorithmic details. This brief is useful for researchers and developers in academia and industry from the fields of speech processing and speech recognition, specifically Keyword Spotting.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology, SFCM 2013, held in Berlin, in September 2013. The 7 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions and are complemented with an invited talk. The papers discuss recent advances in the field of computational morphology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2013, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, in September 2013. The 65 papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 148 submissions. The main topics of this year's conference was corpora, texts and transcription, speech analysis, recognition and synthesis, and their intertwining within NL dialogue systems. The topics also included speech recognition, corpora and language resources, speech and spoken language generation, tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech, semantic processing of text and speech, integrating applications of text and speech processing, as well as automatic dialogue systems, and multimodal techniques and modelling.

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.

This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, and multimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?."

The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language.

Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi).

Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film.

Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions.

"The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies."

Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany"

EVALITA (http://www.evalita.it/) is the reference evaluation campaign of both Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies for the Italian language. The objective of the shared tasks proposed at EVALITA is to promote the development of language technologies for Italian, providing a common framework where different systems and approaches can be evaluated and compared in a consistent manner. This volume collects the final and extended contributions presented at EVALITA 2011, the third edition of the evaluation campaign. The 36 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 87 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections roughly corresponding to evaluation tasks: parsing - dependency parsing track, parsing - constituency parsing track, domain adaptation for dependency parsing, named entity recognition on transcribed broadcast news, cross-document coreference resolution of named person entities, anaphora resolution, supersense tagging, frame labeling over italian texts, lemmatisation, automatic speech recognition - large vocabulary transcription, forced alignment on spontaneous speech.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, held in Bari, Italy, in February 2012. The 22 full papers, included together with 4 panel papers, were selected from extended versions of the presentations given at the conference, following an additional round of reviewing and revision after the event. The topics covered are as follows: legacy documents and cultural heritage; systems interoperability and data integration; formal and methodological foundations of digital libraries; semantic web and linked data for digital libraries; multilingual information access; digital library infrastructures; metadata creation and management; search engines for digital library systems; evaluation and log data; handling audio/visual and non-traditional objects; user interfaces and visualization; digital library quality; policies and copyright issues in digital libraries; scientific data curation, citation and scholarly publication, user behavior and modeling; and preservation and curation.

The implementation of Enterprise Networks or e-Networking is of paramount importance for organisations. Enterprise-wide networking would warrant that the components of information architecture are organised to harness more out of the organisation's computing power on the desktop. This would also involve establishment of networks that link the various but important subsystems of the enterprise. Our firm belief is that in order to gain a competitive edge the organisations need knowledge and sound strategy. This conviction is particularly true today, considering the pressures from international competition, environmental concerns and complicated ethical issues. This book, entitled A Manager's Primer on e-Networking, negotiates the hyper dimensions of the Internet through stories from myriad of Web sites with its fluent presentation and simple but chronological organisation of topics highlighting numerous opportunities and providing a solid starting point not only for inexperienced entrepreneurs and managers but anyone interested in applying information technology in the business. I sincerely hope the book will help as well many small and medium size companies and organisations to launch corporate networking successfully in order to attain their strategic objectives. Rajiv Jayashankar, Ph. D.

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.

The two-volume set LNCS 7649 + 7650 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2012, held in Boston, MA, USA, in November 2012. The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier forum for Semantic Web research, where cutting edge scientific results and technological innovations are presented, where problems and solutions are discussed, and where the future of this vision is being developed. It brings together specialists in fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and the social sciences. Volume 1 contains a total of 41 papers which were presented in the research track. They were carefully reviewed and selected from 186 submissions. Volume 2 contains 17 papers from the in-use track which were accepted from 77 submissions. In addition, it presents 8 contributions to the evaluations and experiments track and 7 long papers and 8 short papers of the doctoral consortium.

Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications integrates Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) Technologies by first presenting a rigorous analysis of requirements presented by diverse classes of cooperative applications, ranging from cooperative authoring, through design for manufacturing, to interorganizational workflows, and then goes on to introduce a language that is suitable for the specification of cooperative activities. This language is based on a formal model and provides a collection of tools that allow the users to reason about the correctness of specifications, rather than relying on mechanisms that detect possible violations at run-time. The transaction model introduced in this monograph combines the use of private work spaces that allow individual participants to work independently, with synchronization mechanisms that allow them to combine their work to form a coherent whole.Finally, this monograph shows how the new transactional concepts developed in the project can be mapped into the transaction manager of an object-oriented database management system to provide a clean and efficient implementation. Transaction Management Support for Cooperative Applications summarizes the state of the art of key technologies in cooperative activities and transactions. This book will be extremely useful to students, researchers, and technology developers in the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and Transaction Processing (TP) Technologies, and is suitable as a text or reference for a graduate-level course on Database Systems or Computer Supported Cooperative Work.