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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which is hardly surprising, since storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book provides an overview of the principal problems, approaches, and challenges faced today in modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals, causality, and time using formalisms from planning, case-based reasoning, and temporal reasoning, and discusses fundamental limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and fictional entities, for assessing the pace of a narrative, and offers an empirical theory of audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called NarrativeML. The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed, including annotation methods for long literary narratives, the representation of modality and habituality, and characterizing the goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful authoring aids. This is the first book to provide a systematic foundation that integrates together narratology, AI, and computational linguistics. It can serve as a narratology primer for computer scientists and an elucidation of computational narratology for literary theorists. It is written in a highly accessible manner and is intended for use by a broad scientific audience that includes linguists (computational and formal semanticists), AI researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, game developers, and narrative theorists. Table of Contents: List of Figures / List of Tables / Narratological Background / Characters as Intentional Agents / Time / Plot / Summary and Future Directions

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 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."

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.

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

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

Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issues

The book discusses some of the latest theoretical and practical developments in the areas involved, including computational models for language tasks, tools and resources that help to approximate the linguistic environment available to children during acquisition, and discussions of challenging aspects of language that children have to master.

This is a much-needed collection that provides a cross-section of recent multidisciplinary research on the computational modeling of language acquisition. It is targeted at anyone interested in the relevance of computational techniques for understanding language acquisition. Readers of this book will be introduced to some of the latest approaches to these tasks including:

* Models of acquisition of various types of linguistic information (from words to syntax and semantics) and their relevance to research on human language acquisition

* Analysis of linguistic and contextual factors that influence acquisition

* Resources and tools for investigating these tasks

Each chapter is presented in a self-contained manner, providing a detailed description of the relevant aspects related to research on language acquisition, and includes illustrations and tables to complement these in-depth discussions. Though there are no formal prerequisites, some familiarity with the basic concepts of human and computational language acquisition is beneficial.

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.

This collection of papers takes linguists to the leading edge of techniques in generative lexicon theory, the linguistic composition methodology that arose from the imperative to provide a compositional semantics for the contextual modifications in meaning that emerge in real linguistic usage. Today's growing shift towards distributed compositional analyses evinces the applicability of GL theory, and the contributions to this volume, presented at three international workshops (GL-2003, GL-2005 and GL-2007) address the relationship between compositionality in language and the mechanisms of selection in grammar that are necessary to maintain this property. The core unresolved issues in compositionality, relating to the interpretation of context and the mechanisms of selection, are treated from varying perspectives within GL theory, including its basic theoretical mechanisms and its analytical viewpoint on linguistic phenomena.

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.