This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, held in Alicante, Spain, in June 2011. The 11 revised full papers and 11 revised short papers presented together with 23 poster papers, 1 invited talk and 6 papers of the NLDB 2011 doctoral symposium were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions. The papers address all aspects of Natural Language Processing related areas and present current research on topics such as natural language in conceptual modeling, NL interfaces for data base querying/retrieval, NL-based integration of systems, large-scale online linguistic resources, applications of computational linguistics in information systems, management of textual databases NL on data warehouses and data mining, NLP applications, as well as NL and ubiquitous computing.

One of the aims of Natural Language Processing is to facilitate .the use of computers by allowing their users to communicate in natural language. There are two important aspects to person-machine communication: understanding and generating. While natural language understanding has been a major focus of research, natural language generation is a relatively new and increasingly active field of research. This book presents an overview of the state of the art in natural language generation, describing both new results and directions for new research. The principal emphasis of natural language generation is not only to facili tate the use of computers but also to develop a computational theory of human language ability. In doing so, it is a tool for extending, clarifying and verifying theories that have been put forth in linguistics, psychology and sociology about how people communicate. A natural language generator will typically have access to a large body of knowledge from which to select information to present to users as well as numer of expressing it. Generating a text can thus be seen as a problem of ous ways decision-making under multiple constraints: constraints from the propositional knowledge at hand, from the linguistic tools available, from the communicative goals and intentions to be achieved, from the audience the text is aimed at and from the situation and past discourse. Researchers in generation try to identify the factors involved in this process and determine how best to represent the factors and their dependencies."

A selection of papers presented at the international conference Applied Logic: Logic at Work', held in Amsterdam in December 1992. Nowadays, the term applied logic' has a very wide meaning, as numerous applications of logical methods in computer science, formal linguistics and other fields testify. Such applications are by no means restricted to the use of known logical techniques: at its best, applied logic involves a back-and-forth dialogue between logical theory and the problem domain. The papers focus on the application of logic to the study of natural language, in syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and the effect of these studies on the development of logic. In the last decade, the dynamic nature of natural language has been the most interesting challenge for logicians. Dynamic semantics is here applied to new topics, the dynamic approach is extended to syntax, and several methodological issues in dynamic semantics are systematically investigated. Other methodological issues in the formal studies of natural language are discussed, such as the need for types, modal operators and other logical operators in the formal framework. Further articles address the scope of these methodological issues from other perspectives ranging from cognition to computation. The volume presents papers that are interesting for graduate students and researchers in the field of logic, philosophy of language, formal semantics and pragmatics, and computational linguistics.

Corpus-based methods will be found at the heart of many language and speech processing systems. This book provides an in-depth introduction to these technologies through chapters describing basic statistical modeling techniques for language and speech, the use of Hidden Markov Models in continuous speech recognition, the development of dialogue systems, part-of-speech tagging and partial parsing, data-oriented parsing and n-gram language modeling. The book attempts to give both a clear overview of the main technologies used in language and speech processing, along with sufficient mathematics to understand the underlying principles. There is also an extensive bibliography to enable topics of interest to be pursued further. Overall, we believe that the book will give newcomers a solid introduction to the field and it will give existing practitioners a concise review of the principal technologies used in state-of-the-art language and speech processing systems. Corpus-Based Methods in Language and Speech Processing is an initiative of ELSNET, the European Network in Language and Speech. In its activities, ELSNET attaches great importance to the integration of language and speech, both in research and in education. The need for and the potential of this integration are well demonstrated by this publication.

Over the last few decades, research on handwriting recognition has made impressive progress. The research and development on handwritten word recognition are to a large degree motivated by many application areas, such as automated postal address and code reading, data acquisition in banks, text-voice conversion, security, etc. As the prices of scanners, com puters and handwriting-input devices are falling steadily, we have seen an increased demand for handwriting recognition systems and software pack ages. Some commercial handwriting recognition systems are now available in the market. Current commercial systems have an impressive performance in recognizing machine-printed characters and neatly written texts. For in stance, High-Tech Solutions in Israel has developed several products for container ID recognition, car license plate recognition and package label recognition. Xerox in the U. S. has developed TextBridge for converting hardcopy documents into electronic document files. In spite of the impressive progress, there is still a significant perfor mance gap between the human and the machine in recognizing off-line unconstrained handwritten characters and words. The difficulties encoun tered in recognizing unconstrained handwritings are mainly caused by huge variations in writing styles and the overlapping and the interconnection of neighboring characters. Furthermore, many applications demand very high recognition accuracy and reliability. For example, in the banking sector, although automated teller machines (ATMs) and networked banking sys tems are now widely available, many transactions are still carried out in the form of cheques."

Yorick Wilks is a central figure in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. This book celebrates Wilks s career from the perspective of his peers in original chapters each of which analyses an aspect of his work and links it to current thinking in that area. This volume forms a two-part set together with Words and Intelligence I: Selected Works by Yorick Wilks, by the same editors."

This book teaches the principles of natural language processing and covers linguistics issues. It also details the language-processing functions involved, including part-of-speech tagging using rules and stochastic techniques. A key feature of the book is the author's hands-on approach throughout, with extensive exercises, sample code in Prolog and Perl, and a detailed introduction to Prolog. The book is suitable for researchers and students of natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Among all information systems that are nowadays available, web sites are definitely the ones having the widest potential audience and the most significant impact on the everyday life of people. Web sites contribute largely to the information society: they provide visitors with a large array of services and information and allow them to perform various tasks without prior assumptions about their computer literacy. Web sites are assumed to be accessible and usable to the widest possible audience. Consequently, usability has been recognized as a critical success factor for web sites of every kind. Beyond this universal recognition, usability still remains a notion that is hard to grasp. Summative evaluation methods have been introduced to identify potential usability problems to assess the quality of web sites. However, summative evaluation remains limited in impact as it does not necessarily deliver constructive comments to web site designers and developers on how to solve the usability problems. Formative evaluation methods have been introduced to address this issue. Evaluation remains a process that is hard to drive and perform, while its potential impact is probably maximal for the benefit of the final user. This complexity is exacerbated when web sites are very large, potentially up to several hundreds of thousands of pages, thus leading to a situation where eval uating the web site is almost impossible to conduct manually. Therefore, many attempts have been made to support evaluation with: * Models that capture some characteristics of the web site of interest.

Concurrency in Dependable Computing focuses on concurrency related issues in the area of dependable computing. Failures of system components, be hardware units or software modules, can be viewed as undesirable events occurring concurrently with a set of normal system events. Achieving dependability therefore is closely related to, and also benefits from, concurrency theory and formalisms. This beneficial relationship appears to manifest into three strands of work. Application level structuring of concurrent activities. Concepts such as atomic actions, conversations, exception handling, view synchrony, etc., are useful in structuring concurrent activities so as to facilitate attempts at coping with the effects of component failures. Replication induced concurrency management. Replication is a widely used technique for achieving reliability. Replica management essentially involves ensuring that replicas perceive concurrent events identically. Application of concurrency formalisms for dependability assurance. Fault-tolerant algorithms are harder to verify than their fault-free counterparts due to the fact that the impact of component faults at each state need to be considered in addition to valid state transitions. CSP, Petri nets, CCS are useful tools to specify and verify fault-tolerant designs and protocols. Concurrency in Dependable Computing explores many significant issues in all three strands. To this end, it is composed as a collection of papers written by authors well-known in their respective areas of research. To ensure quality, the papers are reviewed by a panel of at least three experts in the relevant area.

Although natural language processing has come far, the technology has not achieved a major impact on society. Is this because of some fundamental limitation that cannot be overcome? Or because there has not been enough time to refine and apply theoretical work already done? Editors Madeleine Bates and Ralph Weischedel believe it is neither; they feel that several critical issues have never been adequately addressed in either theoretical or applied work, and they have invited capable researchers in the field to do that in Challenges in Natural Language Processing. This volume will be of interest to researchers of computational linguistics in academic and non-academic settings and to graduate students in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and linguistics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2009, held in Roskilde, Denmark, in October 2009.

The 57 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. They are structured in topical sections on database management, information retrieval, extraction and mining, ontologies and semantic web, intelligent information extraction from texts, advances in fuzzy querying, personalization, preferences, context and recommendation, and Web as a stream.

th TSD 2009was the 12 eventin the series of InternationalConferenceson Text, Speech andDialoguesupportedbytheInternationalSpeechCommunicationAssociation(ISCA) ? and Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics (CSKI). This year, TSD was held in Plzen ? (Pilsen), in the Primavera Conference Center, during September 13-17, 2009 and it was organized by the University of West Bohemia in Plzen ? in cooperation with Masaryk University of Brno, Czech Republic. Like its predecessors, TSD 2009 hi- lighted to both the academic and scienti?c world the importance of text and speech processing and its most recent breakthroughsin current applications. Both experienced researchers and professionals as well as newcomers to the text and speech processing ?eld, interested in designing or evaluating interactive software, developing new int- action technologies, or investigatingoverarchingtheories of text and speech processing found in the TSD conference a forum to communicate with people sharing similar - terests. The conference is an interdisciplinary forum, intertwining research in speech and language processing with its applications in everyday practice. We feel that the mixture of different approaches and applications offered a great opportunity to get - quaintedwith currentactivitiesin all aspects oflanguagecommunicationand to witness the amazing vitality of researchers from developing countries too. This year's conference was partially oriented toward semantic processing, which was chosen as the main topic of the conference. All invited speakers (Frederick Jelinek, Louise Guthrie, Roberto Pieraccini, Tilman Becker, and Elmar Not ] h) gave lectures on thenewestresultsintherelativelybroadandstillunexploredareaofsemanticprocessing."

In 1992 it seemed very difficult to answer the question whether it would be possible to develop a portable system for the automatic recognition and translation of spon taneous speech. Previous research work on speech processing had focused on read speech only and international projects aimed at automated text translation had just been terminated without achieving their objectives. Within this context, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) made a careful analysis of all national and international research projects conducted in the field of speech and language technology before deciding to launch an eight-year basic-research lead project in which research groups were to cooperate in an interdisciplinary and international effort covering the disciplines of computer science, computational linguistics, translation science, signal processing, communi cation science and artificial intelligence. At some point, the project comprised up to 135 work packages with up to 33 research groups working on these packages. The project was controlled by means of a network plan. Every two years the project sit uation was assessed and the project goals were updated. An international scientific advisory board provided advice for BMBF. A new scientific approach was chosen for this project: coping with the com plexity of spontaneous speech with all its pertinent phenomena such as ambiguities, self-corrections, hesitations and disfluencies took precedence over the intended lex icon size. Another important aspect was that prosodic information was exploited at all processing stages."

New material treats such contemporary subjects as automatic speech recognition and speaker verification for banking by computer and privileged (medical, military, diplomatic) information and control access.

The book also focuses on speech and audio compression for mobile communication and the Internet. The importance of subjective quality criteria is stressed.

The book also contains introductions to human monaural and binaural hearing, and the basic concepts of signal analysis.

Beyond speech processing, this revised and extended new edition of Computer Speech gives an overview of natural language technology and presents the nuts and bolts of state-of-the-art speech dialogue systems.

Provides a broad sample of current information processing applications

Includes examples of successful applications that will encourage practitioners to apply the techniques described in the book to real-life problems

Internet and web technology penetrates many aspects of our daily life. Its importance as a medium for business transactions will grow exponentially during the next few years. In terms of the involved market volume, the B2B area will hereby be the most interesting area. Also, it will be the place, where the new technology will lead to drastic changes in established customer relationships and business models. In an era where open and flexible electronic commerce provides new types of services to its users, simple 1-1 connections will be replaced by n-m relationships between customers and vendors. This new flexibility in electronic trading will generate serious challenges. The main problem stems from the heterogeneity of information descriptions used by vendors and customers, creating problems in both manual trading and in direct 1-1 electronic trading. In the case of B2B market places, it becomes too serious to be neglected. Product descriptions, catalog formats and business documents are often unstructured and non-standardized. Intelligent solutions that mechanize the structuring, standardizing, aligning, and personalizing process are a key requisite for successfully overcoming the current bottlenecks of B2B electronic commerce while enabling its further growth. Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce discusses the main problems of information integration in this area and sketches several technological solution paths. Intelligent Information Integration in B2B Electronic Commerce is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry and graduate level students in Computer Science.

Since 1993 the conference Developments in Language Theory (DLT) has been held in Europe every odd year and, since 2002, outside Europe every even year. The 13th conference in this series was DLT 2009. It took place in Stuttgart fromJune30to July3.PreviousmeetingsoccurredinTurku(1993), Magdeburg (1995), Thessaloniki(1997), Aachen(1999), Vienna(2001), Kyoto(2002), Szeged (2003), Auckland (2004), Palermo (2005), Santa Barbara (2006), Turku (2007), and Kyoto (2008). The DLT conference has developed into the main forum for language theory and related topics. This has also been re?ected in the high quality of the 70 s- missions received in 2009. Most submissions were reviewed by four Programme Committeemembersandtheirsub-referees.TheProgrammeCommitteeselected the best 35 papers for presentation during the conference. These 35 papers are also published in this proceedings volume. Members of the ProgrammeComm- tee were not allowed to submit papers. The work of the Programme Committee wasorganizedusingtheEasyChairconferencesystem, thankstoAndreiVoronkov. The conference programme included ?ve invited lectures. They were given by Mikola j Bojanczyk (Warsaw), Paul Gastin (Cachan), Tero Harju (Turku), ChristosKapoutsis(Nicosia), andBenjaminSteinberg(Ottawa).Wearegrateful to the invited speakers for accepting the invitation and presenting their lectures and for their contributions to the proceedings. The Informatik Forum Stuttgart provided a best paper award, which was selected by the Programme Committee. The recipient was: "Magic Numbers and Ternary Alphabet" by Galina Jiraskova."

Current Work and Open Problems: A Road-Map for Research into the Emergence of Communication and Language Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Caroline Lyon, and Angelo Cangelosi 1.1. Introduction This book brings together work on the emergence of communication and language from researchers working in a broad array of scientific paradigms in North America, Europe, Japan and Africa. We hope that its multi-disciplinary approach will encourage cross-fertilization and promote further advances in this active research field. The volume draws on diverse disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, ethology, anthropology, robotics, and computer science. Computational simulations of the emergence of phenomena associated with communication and language play a key role in illuminating some of the most significant issues, and the renewed scientific interest in language emergence has benefited greatly from research in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The book starts with this road map chapter by the editors, pointing to the ways in which disparate disciplines can inform and stimulate each other. It examines the role of simulations as a novel way to express theories in science, and their contribution to the development of a new approach to the study of the emergence of communication and language. We will also discuss and collect the most promising directions and grand challenge problems for future research. The present volume, is organized into three parts: I. Empirical Investi- tions on Human Language, II. Synthesis and Simulation of Communication and Language in Artificial Systems, and III. Insights from Animal Communication.

Automatic Text Categorization and Clustering are becoming more and more important as the amount of text in electronic format grows and the access to it becomes more necessary and widespread. Well known applications are spam filtering and web search, but a large number of everyday uses exist (intelligent web search, data mining, law enforcement, etc.) Currently, researchers are employing many intelligent techniques for text categorization and clustering, ranging from support vector machines and neural networks to Bayesian inference and algebraic methods, such as Latent Semantic Indexing. This volume offers a wide spectrum of research work developed for intelligent text categorization and clustering. In the following, we give a brief introduction of the chapters that are included in this book.

This book explains how to build Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems - computer software systems which use techniques from artificial intelligence and computational linguistics to automatically generate understandable texts in English or other human languages, either in isolation or as part of multimedia documents, Web pages, and speech output systems. Typically starting from some non-linguistic representation of information as input, NLG systems use knowledge about language and the application domain to automatically produce documents, reports, explanations, help messages, and other kinds of texts. The book covers the algorithms and representations needed to perform the core tasks of document planning, microplanning, and surface realization, using a case study to show how these components fit together. It also discusses engineering issues such as system architecture, requirements analysis, and the integration of text generation into multimedia and speech output systems.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2007, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2007.

The 22 revised full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous presentations given at the symposium. The focus of the papers is on the following topics: conceptual modeling of spatial relations, pragmatics and game theory, atypical valency phenomena, lexical typology, formal semantics and experimental evidence, exceptional quantifier scope, Georgian focussing particles, polarity and pragmatics, dynamics of belief, learning theory, inquisitive semantics, modal logic, coalgebras, computational linguistics of Georgian, type-logical grammar and cross-serial dependencies, non-monotonic logic, Japanese quantifiers, intuitionistic logic, semantics of negated nominals, word sense disambiguation, semantics of question-embedding predicates, and reciprocals and computational complexity.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 23rd Canadian Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (AI 2010). The conference was held in Ottawa, Ontario, fromMay31toJune2,2010,andwascollocatedwiththe36thGraphicsInterface Conference(GI2010),andthe7thCanadianConferenceonComputerandRobot Vision (CRV 2010). The Program Committee received 90 submissions for the main conference, AI2010,fromacrossCanadaandaroundtheworld.Eachsubmissionwasreviewed byuptofourreviewers.Forthe?nalconferenceprogramandforinclusioninthese proceedings, 22 regular papers, with allocation of 12 pages each, were selected. Additionally,26 shortpapers,with allocationof 4 pageseach,wereaccepted. The papers from the Graduate Student Symposium are also included in the proceedings:sixoral(fourpages)andsixposter(twopages)presentationpapers. The conference programfeatured three keynote presentations by Dekang Lin (Google Inc.), Guy Lapalme (Universit'edeMontr' eal), and Evangelos Milios (Dalhousie University). The one-page abstracts of their talks are also included in the proceedings. Two pre-conference workshops, each with their own proceedings, were held on May 30, 2010. The Workshop on Intelligent Methods for Protecting Privacy and Con?dentiality in Data was organized by Khaled El Emam and Marina Sokolova. The workshop on Teaching AI in Computing and Information Te- nology (AI-CIT 2010) was organized by Danny Silver, Leila Kosseim, and Sajid Hussain. This conference wouldnot havebeen possible without the hardworkofmany people.WewouldliketothankallProgramCommitteemembersandexternal- viewers for their e?ort in providing high-quality reviews in a timely manner. We thank all the authors of submitted papers for submitting their work,and the - thors of selected papers for their collaboration in preparation of the ?nal copy. ManythankstoEbrahimBagheriandMarinaSokolovafororganizingtheGra- ateStudentSymposium,andchairingtheProgramCommitteeofthesymposium. We are in debt to Andrei Voronkov for developing the EasyChair conference managementsystemandmakingitfreelyavailabletotheacademicworld.Itisan amazinglyelegantand functionalWeb-basedsystem,whichsavedus muchtime.

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored. Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerized lexicons for the automatic treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects.

th CICLing 2009 markedthe 10 anniversary of the Annual Conference on Intel- gent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. The CICLing conferences provide a wide-scope forum for the discussion of the art and craft of natural language processing research as well as the best practices in its applications. This volume contains ?ve invited papers and the regular papers accepted for oral presentation at the conference. The papers accepted for poster presentation were published in a special issue of another journal (see the website for more information). Since 2001, the proceedings of CICLing conferences have been published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, as volumes 2004, 2276, 2588, 2945, 3406, 3878, 4394, and 4919. This volume has been structured into 12 sections: - Trends and Opportunities - Linguistic Knowledge Representation Formalisms - Corpus Analysis and Lexical Resources - Extraction of Lexical Knowledge - Morphology and Parsing - Semantics - Word Sense Disambiguation - Machine Translation and Multilinguism - Information Extraction and Text Mining - Information Retrieval and Text Comparison - Text Summarization - Applications to the Humanities A total of 167 papers by 392 authors from 40 countries were submitted for evaluation by the International Program Committee, see Tables 1 and 2. This volume contains revised versions of 44 papers, by 120 authors, selected for oral presentation; the acceptance rate was 26. 3%.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Third International Sanskrit C- putational Linguistics Symposium hosted by the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, IndiaduringJanuary15-17,2009.TheseriesofsymposiaonSanskrit Computational Linguistics began in 2007. The ?rst symposium was hosted by INRIA atRocquencourt, Francein October 2007asa partofthe jointcollabo- tion between INRIA and the University of Hyderabad. This joint collaboration expanded both geographically as well as academically covering more facets of Sanskrit Computaional Linguistics, when the second symposium was hosted by Brown University, USA in May 2008. We received 16 submissions, which were reviewed by the members of the Program Committee. After discussion, nine of them were selected for presen- tion. These nine papers fall under four broad categories: four papers deal with the structure of Pan - ini's Astad - hyay - - ?. Two of them deal with parsing issues, . .. two with various aspects of machine translation, and the last one with the Web concordance of an important Sanskrit text. Ifwelookretrospectivelyoverthelasttwoyears, thethreesymposiainsucc- sion have seen not only continuity of some of the themes, but also steady growth of the community. As is evident, researchers from diverse disciplines such as l- guistics, computer science, philology, and vy- akarana are collaborating with the . scholars from other disciplines, witnessing the growth of Sanskrit computational linguistics as an emergent discipline. We are grateful to S.D. Joshi, Jan Houben, and K.V.R. Krishnamacharyulu for accepting our invitation to deliver the invited speeches."