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.

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.

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.

More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text, digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text, which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However, the specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of standardized orthography, in particular -- pose special challenges for NLP. This book aims to give an introduction to NLP for historical texts and an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts (scanning and OCR), discusses text encoding and annotation schemes, and presents examples of corpora of historical texts in a variety of languages. The book then discusses specific methods, such as creating part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling variation. A final chapter analyzes the relationship between NLP and the digital humanities. Certain recently emerging textual genres, such as SMS, social media, and chat messages, or newsgroup and forum postings share a number of properties with historical texts, for example, nonstandard orthography and grammar, and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and techniques required for the effective processing of historical texts are thus also of interest for research in other domains. Table of Contents: Introduction / NLP and Digital Humanities / Spelling in Historical Texts / Acquiring Historical Texts / Text Encoding and Annotation Schemes / Handling Spelling Variation / NLP Tools for Historical Languages / Historical Corpora / Conclusion / Bibliography

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.

One consequence of the pervasive use of computers is that most documents originate in digital form. Widespread use of the Internet makes them readily available. Text mining - the process of analyzing unstructured natural-language text - is concerned with how to extract information from these documents. Developed from the authors' highly successful Springer reference on text mining, Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining is an introductory textbook and guide to this rapidly evolving field. Integrating topics spanning the varied disciplines of data mining, machine learning, databases, and computational linguistics, this uniquely useful book also provides practical advice for text mining. In-depth discussions are presented on issues of document classification, information retrieval, clustering and organizing documents, information extraction, web-based data-sourcing, and prediction and evaluation. Background on data mining is beneficial, but not essential. Where advanced concepts are discussed that require mathematical maturity for a proper understanding, intuitive explanations are also provided for less advanced readers. Topics and features: presents a comprehensive, practical and easy-to-read introduction to text mining; includes chapter summaries, useful historical and bibliographic remarks, and classroom-tested exercises for each chapter; explores the application and utility of each method, as well as the optimum techniques for specific scenarios; provides several descriptive case studies that take readers from problem description to systems deployment in the real world; includes access to industrial-strength text-mining software that runs on any computer; describes methods that rely on basic statistical techniques, thus allowing for relevance to all languages (not just English); contains links to free downloadable software and other supplementary instruction material. Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining is an essential resource for IT professionals and managers, as well as a key text for advanced undergraduate computer science students and beginning graduate students. Dr. Sholom M. Weiss is a Research Staff Member with the IBM Predictive Modeling group, in Yorktown Heights, New York, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Dr. Nitin Indurkhya is Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia, as well as founder and president of data-mining consulting company Data-Miner Pty Ltd. Dr. Tong Zhang is Associate Professor at the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

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.

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 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 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 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 Third International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World, IMCW 2012, held in Ankara, Turkey, in September 2012. The 16 revised full papers presented together with three keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 30 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-science and information management; scholarly communication and institutional repositories; information literacy and academic libraries; different perspectives on information management.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 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.

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

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

This white paper is part of a series that promotes knowledge about language technology and its potential. It addresses educators, journalists, politicians, language communities and others. The availability and use of language technology in Europe varies between languages. Consequently, the actions that are required to further support research and development of language technologies also differ for each language. The required actions depend on many factors, such as the complexity of a given language and the size of its community. META-NET, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission, has conducted an analysis of current language resources and technologies. This analysis focused on the 23 official European languages as well as other important national and regional languages in Europe. The results of this analysis suggest that there are many significant research gaps for each language. A more detailed expert analysis and assessment of the current situation will help maximise the impact of additional research and minimize any risks. META-NET consists of 54 research centres from 33 countries that are working with stakeholders from commercial businesses, government agencies, industry, research organisations, software companies, technology providers and European universities. Together, they are creating a common technology vision while developing a strategic research agenda that shows how language technology applications can address any research gaps by 2020.