Arti?cial intelligence has recently been re-energized to provide the clues needed to resolve complicated problems. AI is also expected to play a central role in enhancing a wide variety of daily activities. JSAI (The Japanese Society for Arti?cial Intelligence) is responsible for boosting the activities of AI researchers in Japan, and their series of annual conferences o?ers attractive forums for the exposition of the latest achievements and inter-group communication. In the past, the best papers of the conferences were published in the LNAI series. This book consists of award papers from the 22nd annual conference of the JSAI (JSAI 2008) and selected papers from the three co-located workshops. Eight papers were selected among more than 400 presentations at the conference and 18 papers were selected from the 34 presentations at the co-located wo- shops; Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 5 (LENLS 2008), the 2nd International Workshop on Juris-informatics (JURISIN 2008), and the First International Workshop on Laughter in Interaction and Body Movement (LIBM 2008). The award papers from JSAI 2008 were selected through a r- orous selection process. In the process, papers recommended by session chairs, session commentators, and PC members were carefully reviewed, before the ?nal decision was made.

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.

The International Conference on the Computer Processing of Oriental L- guages(ICCPOL)seriesishostedbytheChineseandOrientalLanguagesSociety (COLCS),aninternationalsocietyfoundedin1975.RecentICCPOLeventshave been held in Hong Kong (1997), Tokushima, Japan (1999), Seoul, Korea (2001), Shenyang, China (2003) and Singapore (2006). This volume presents the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference ontheComputerProcessingofOrientalLanguages(ICCPOL2009)heldinHong Kong, March 26-27, 2009. We received 63 submissions and all the papers went through a blind review process by members of the Program Committee. After careful discussion, 25 of them were selected for oral presentation and 15 for poster presentation. The accepted papers covered a variety of topics in natural language processing and its applications, including word segmentation, phrase and term extraction, chunking and parsing, semantic labelling, opinion mining, ontology construction, machine translation, information extraction, document summarization and so on. On behalf of the Program Committee, we would like to thank all authors of submitted papers for their support. We wish to extend our appreciation to the Program Committee members and additional external reviewers for their tremendous e?ort and excellent reviews. We gratefully acknowledge the Or- nizing Committee and Publication Committee members for their generous c- tribution to the success of the conference. We also thank the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP), the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, the Department of Systems - gineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and the Centre for Language Technology, Macquarie University, Australia for their valuable support.

Work practices and organizational processes vary widely and evolve constantly. The technological infrastructure has to follow, allowing or even supporting these changes. Traditional approaches to software engineering reach their limits whenever the full spectrum of user requirements cannot be anticipated or the frequency of changes makes software reengineering cycles too clumsy to address all the needs of a specific field of application. Moreover, the increasing importance of 'infrastructural' aspects, particularly the mutual dependencies between technologies, usages, and domain competencies, calls for a differentiation of roles beyond the classical user-designer dichotomy. End user development (EUD) addresses these issues by offering lightweight, use-time support which allows users to configure, adapt, and evolve their software by themselves. EUD is understood as a set of methods, techniques, and tools that allow users of software systems who are acting as non-professional software developers to 1 create, modify, or extend a software artifact. While programming activities by non-professional actors are an essential focus, EUD also investigates related activities such as collective understanding and sense-making of use problems and solutions, the interaction among end users with regard to the introduction and diffusion of new configurations, or delegation patterns that may also partly involve professional designers.

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%.

Dependency-based methods for syntactic parsing have become increasingly popular in natural language processing in recent years. This book gives a thorough introduction to the methods that are most widely used today. After an introduction to dependency grammar and dependency parsing, followed by a formal characterization of the dependency parsing problem, the book surveys the three major classes of parsing models that are in current use: transition-based, graph-based, and grammar-based models. It continues with a chapter on evaluation and one on the comparison of different methods, and it closes with a few words on current trends and future prospects of dependency parsing. The book presupposes a knowledge of basic concepts in linguistics and computer science, as well as some knowledge of parsing methods for constituency-based representations. Table of Contents: Introduction / Dependency Parsing / Transition-Based Parsing / Graph-Based Parsing / Grammar-Based Parsing / Evaluation / Comparison / Final Thoughts

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."

Acta Numerica is an annual publication containing invited survey papers by leading researchers in numerical mathematics and scientific computing. The papers present overviews of recent developments in their area and provide state-of-the-art techniques and analysis.

As online information grows dramatically, search engines such as Google are playing a more and more important role in our lives. Critical to all search engines is the problem of designing an effective retrieval model that can rank documents accurately for a given query. This has been a central research problem in information retrieval for several decades. In the past ten years, a new generation of retrieval models, often referred to as statistical language models, has been successfully applied to solve many different information retrieval problems. Compared with the traditional models such as the vector space model, these new models have a more sound statistical foundation and can leverage statistical estimation to optimize retrieval parameters. They can also be more easily adapted to model non-traditional and complex retrieval problems. Empirically, they tend to achieve comparable or better performance than a traditional model with less effort on parameter tuning. This book systematically reviews the large body of literature on applying statistical language models to information retrieval with an emphasis on the underlying principles, empirically effective language models, and language models developed for non-traditional retrieval tasks. All the relevant literature has been synthesized to make it easy for a reader to digest the research progress achieved so far and see the frontier of research in this area. The book also offers practitioners an informative introduction to a set of practically useful language models that can effectively solve a variety of retrieval problems. No prior knowledge about information retrieval is required, but some basic knowledge about probability and statistics would be useful for fully digesting all the details. Table of Contents: Introduction / Overview of Information Retrieval Models / Simple Query Likelihood Retrieval Model / Complex Query Likelihood Model / Probabilistic Distance Retrieval Model / Language Models for Special Retrieval Tasks / Language Models for Latent Topic Analysis / Conclusions

WearepleasedtowelcomeyoutotheproceedingsoftheThirdInternationalC- ference onSemantic andDigital Media Technologiesheld inKoblenz, Germany. The SAMT agenda brings together researchers at extreme ends of the - mantic multimedia spectrum. At one end, the Semantic Web and its supporting technologies are becoming established in both the open data environment and within specialist domains, such as corporate intranet search, e-Science (parti- larly life sciences), and cultural heritage. To facilitate the world-wide sharing of media, W3C is developing standard ways of denoting fragments of audio/visual content and of specifying and associating semantics with these. At the other end of the spectrum, media analysis tools continue to grow in sophistication, identifying features that can then be associated with explicit semantics, be they expressed formally or informally, using proprietary formats or open standards. Recent progress at these two fronts of the SAMT spectrum means that research spanningthesemanticgapisnowofvitalimportancetofeedtherealapplications that are emerging. This conference also represents a step towards bridging the gap between the research cultures and their respective approaches at both ends of the spectrum. The papers selected show that SAMT is able to attract researchers from media analysis, who see the bene?ts that more explicit semantics can provide, as well as researchers from knowledge engineering who realize that, while a picture can be expressed as a thousand concepts, a million morearewaiting to be extracted

IBERAMIA is the international conference series of the Ibero-American Art- cialIntelligencecommunitythathasbeenmeetingeverytwoyearssincethe1988 meeting in Barcelona. The conference is supported by the main Ibero-American societies of AI and provides researchers from Portugal, Spain, and Latin Am- ica the opportunity to meet with AI researchers from all over the world. Since 1998, IBERAMIA has been a widely recognized international conference, with its papers written and presented in English, and its proceedings published by Springer in the LNAI series. This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at Iberamia 2008, held in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2008. For this conference, 147 papers were submitted for the main track, and 46 papers were accepted. Each submitted paper was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee (PC), coor- nated by an Area Chair. In certain cases, extra reviewerswererecruited to write additional reviews. The list of Area Chairs, PC members, and reviewers can be found on the pages that follow. The authors of the submitted papers represent 14 countries with topics c- ering the whole spectrum of themes in AI: robotics and multiagent systems, knowledge representation and constraints, machine learning and planning, n- ural language processing and AI applications. TheprogramforIberamia2008alsoincludedthreeinvitedspeakers:Christian Lemaitre (LANIA, M exico), R. Michael Young (NCSU, USA) and Miguel Dias (Microsoft LDMC, Lisbon) as well as ?ve workshops.

The annual Text, Speech and Dialogue Conference (TSD), which originated in 1998, is now starting its second decade. So far almost 900 authors from 45 countries have contributed to the proceedings. TSD constitutes a recognizedplatform for the presen- tion and discussion of state-of-the-art technology and recent achievements in the ?eld of natural language processing. It has become an interdisciplinary forum, interweaving the themes of speech technology and language processing. The conference attracts - searchers not only from Central and Eastern Europe, but also from other parts of the world. Indeed, one of its goals has always been to bring together NLP researchers with different interests from different parts of the world and to promote their mutual co- eration. One of the ambitions of the conference is, as its title says, not only to deal with dialogue systems as such, but also to contribute to improving dialogue between researchers in the two areas of NLP, i. e., between text and speech people. In our view, the TSD conference was successful in this respect in 2008 as well. This volume contains the proceedings of the 11th TSD conference, held in Brno, Czech Republic in September 2008. Following the review process, 79 papers were - ceptedoutof173submitted, anacceptancerateof45. 7%.

TheseriesofworkshopsonMachineLearningforMultimodalInteraction(MLMI) celebratesthisyearits?fthanniversary.Onthisoccasion, anumberofinnovations havebeenintroducedin the reviewingandpublicationprocedures, while keeping the focus onthe samescienti?c topics. For the ?rst time, the reviewing process has been adapted in order to p- parethe proceedings in time for the workshop, held on September 8-10,2008, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The 47 submissions received by the Program C- mittee were ?rst reviewed by three PC members each, and then advocated by an Area Chair. Overall, 12 oral presentations (ca. 25% of all submissions) and 15 poster presentations were selected. Authors were given one month to revise their papers according to the reviews, and the ?nal versions were brie?y checked by the two Program Co-chairs. Both types of presentation have been give equal space in the present proceedings. The 32 papers gathered in this volume cover a wide range of topics - lated to human-human communication modeling and processing, as well as to human-computer interaction, using several communication modalities. A sign- icant number of papers focus on the analysis of non-verbal communication cues, such as the expression of emotions, laughter, face turning, or gestures, which demonstrates a growing interest for social signal processing. Yet, another large set of papers targets the analysis of communicative content, with a focus on the abstractionofinformationfrommeetingsintheformofsummaries, actionitems, ordialogueacts.OthertopicspresentedatMLMI2008includeaudio-visualscene analysis, speech processing, interactive systems and applica

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, GoTAL 2008, Gothenburg, Sweden, August 2008.

The 44 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 107 submissions. The papers address all current issues in computational linguistics and monolingual and multilingual intelligent language processing - theory, methods and applications.

This Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) volume contains the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Computational Forensics (IWCF 2008), held August 7-8, 2008. It was a great honor for the organizers to host this scienti?c event at the renowned National Academy of Sciences: Keck Center in Washington, DC, USA. Computational Forensics is an emerging research domain focusing on the investigation of forensic problems using computational methods. Its primary goalis the discoveryand advancement of forensicknowledgeinvolving modeling, computer simulation, and computer-based analysis and recognition in studying and solving forensic problems. The Computational Forensics workshop series is intended as a forum for researchers and practitioners in all areas of computational and forensic sciences. This forum discusses current challenges in computer-assisted forensic investi- tions and presents recent progress and advances. IWCF addresses a broad spectrum of forensic disciplines that use computer tools for criminal investigation. This year's edition covers presentations on c- putational methods for individuality studies, computer-based3D processing and analysis of skulls and human bodies, shoe print preprocessing and analysis, n- ural language analysis and information retrieval to support law enforcement, analysis and group visualization of speech recordings, scanner and print device forensics, and computer-based questioned document and signature analysis.

This volume contains the papers presented at NLDB 2008, the 13th Inter- tional Conference on Natural Language and Information Systems, held June 25-27,2008.It also containssome of the best researchproposalsas submitted to theNLDB2008doctoralsymposiumheldonJune24,2008.Theprogrammealso includes three invited talks covering the main perspectives of the application of naturallanguageto informationsystems: the wayhumansprocess, communicate and understand natural language, what are the implications and challenges - wardssemanticsearchforthenewWebgeneration, hownaturallanguageapplies to the well-established database way of querying as a means to unlock data and information for end users. We received 68 papers as regular papers for the main conference and 14 short papers for the doctoral symposium. Each paper for the main conference was assigned four reviewers based on the preferences expressed by the Program Committee members. We ensured that every paper had at least two reviewers that expressedinterest in reviewing it or indicated that they could reviewit. We ensured that each paper got at least three reviews. As a result, only 10% of the papers were reviewed by three reviewers. The Conference Chair and the two Program Committee Co-chairs acted as Meta-Reviewers.Eachofthemtookroughly1/3ofthepapers(obviouslyrespe- ing con?icts of interest), for which s/he was responsible. This included studying the reviews, launching discussions and asking for clari?cations whenever nec- sary, as well as studying the papers whenever a need for an informed additional opinion arose or when the reviewers' notes did not allow for a decision.

The IEEE Tutorialand ResearchWorkshopon Perceptionand InteractiveTe- nologies for Multimodal Dialogue Systems (PIT 2008) is the continuation of a successful series of workshops that started with an ISCA Tutorial and Research WorkshoponMultimodalDialogueSystemsin1999.Thisworkshopwasfollowed by a second one focusing on mobile dialogue systems (IDS 2002), a third one exploring the role of a?ect in dialogue (ADS 2004), and a fourth one focusing on perceptive interfaces (PIT 2006). Like its predecessors, PIT 2008 took place at Kloster Irsee in Bavaria. Due to the increasing interest in perceptive interfaces, we decided to hold a follow-up workshop on the themes discussed at PIT 2006, but encouraged aboveallpaperswithafocusonperceptioninmultimodaldialoguesystems.PIT 2008received37 paperscoveringthe following topics (1) multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, (2) classi?cation of dialogue acts and sound, (3) recognitionof eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech aswellascombinationsofmodalities, (4) vocal emotion recognition, (5) human-like and social dialogue systems and (6) evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems. Noteworthy was the strong participation from industry at PIT 2008. Indeed, 17 of the accepted 37 papers come from industrial organizations or were written in collaboration with them. Wewouldliketothankallauthorsforthe e?ortthey madewiththeirsubm- sions, and the Program Committee - nearly 50 distinguished researchers from industry and academia - who worked very hard to meet tight deadlines and selected the best contributions for the ?nal program. Special thanks goes to our invited speaker, Anton Batliner from Friedrich-Alexander-Universit] atErlangen- N] urnberg."

The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 19th Annual S- posium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2008) held at the University of Pisa, Italy, June 18-20, 2008. All the papers presented at the conference are originalresearchcontributions on computational pattern matching and analysis. They were selected from 78 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three reviewers. The committee decided to accept 25 papers. The programme also includes three invited talks by Daniel M. Gus?eld from the University of California, Davis, USA, J. Ian Munro from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo! Research, USA. The objective of the annual CPM meetings is to provide an international forum for research in combinatorial pattern matching and related applications. It addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated p- terns such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets, and arrays. The goal is to derive non-trivialcombinatorialproperties of suchstructures and to exploit these properties in order to either achieve superior performance for the cor- sponding computational problems or pinpoint conditions under which searches cannotbeperformede?ciently. Themeeting also dealswith problems incom- tational biology, data compression, data mining, coding, information retrieval, natural language processing and pattern recognition.

The theory of formal languages is widely accepted as the backbone of t- oretical computer science. It mainly originated from mathematics (com- natorics, algebra, mathematical logic) and generative linguistics. Later, new specializations emerged from areas ofeither computer science(concurrent and distributed systems, computer graphics, arti?cial life), biology (plant devel- ment, molecular genetics), linguistics (parsing, text searching), or mathem- ics (cryptography). All human problem solving capabilities can be considered, in a certain sense, as a manipulation of symbols and structures composed by symbols, which is actually the stem of formal language theory. Language - in its two basic forms, natural and arti?cial - is a particular case of a symbol system. This wide range of motivations and inspirations explains the diverse - plicability of formal language theory ? and all these together explain the very large number of monographs and collective volumes dealing with formal language theory. In 2004 Springer-Verlag published the volume Formal Languages and - plications, edited by C. Martin-Vide, V. Mitrana and G. P?un in the series Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing 148, which was aimed at serving as an overall course-aid and self-study material especially for PhD students in formal language theory and applications. Actually, the volume emerged in such a context: it contains the core information from many of the lectures - livered to the students of the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications organized since 2002 by the Research Group on Mathem- ical Linguistics from Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2007, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, in September 2007. The 80 revised full papers presented in this volume cover a wealth of state-of-the-art research results in the field of natural language processing with an emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields.

As well as conveying a message in words and sounds, the speech signal carries information about the speaker's own anatomy, physiology, linguistic experience and mental state. These speaker characteristics are found in speech at all levels of description: from the spectral information in the sounds to the choice of words and utterances themselves.

This two volume set, LNAI 4343 and LNAI 4441, constitutes a state-of-the-art survey for the field of speaker classification. It approaches the following questions: What characteristics of the speaker become manifest in his or her voice and speaking behavior? Which of them can be inferred from analyzing the acoustic realizations? What can this information be used for? Which methods are the most suitable for diversified problems in this area of research? How should the quality of the results be evaluated?

The 22 articles of the second volume comprise a number of selected self-contained papers on research projects in the field of speaker classification. These include among other things a report on a gender recognition system; a study on emotion recognition; a presentation of a text-dependent speaker verification system; an account of the analysis of both speaker and verbal content information - as well as studies on accent identification.

This book celebrates the work of Yorick Wilks in the form of a selection of his papers which are intended to reflect the range and depth of his work. The volume accompanies a Festschrift which celebrates his contribution to the fields of Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. The selected papers reflect Yorick 's contribution to both practical and theoretical aspects of automatic language processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing 2007, held in Mexico City, Mexico in February 2007.

The 53 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. The papers cover all current issues in computational linguistics research and present intelligent text processing applications. The papers are organized in topical sections on: lexical resources, corpus-based knowledge acquisition, morphology and part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, temporal expression treatment, word segmentation, sentence splitting, chunking, grammar formalisms and syntax, word sense disambiguation and discrimination, semantics, humor and emotion analysis; machine translation, natural language generation, intelligent tutoring systems, information retrieval, question answering, text summarization and information extraction, text categorization and clustering, and spell-checking.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2005, held in Helsinki, Finland in September 2005.

The 24 revised full papers and 7 revised poster papers presented together with 2 invited contributions and the abstracts of 6 software demos were selected from 50 submissions and have gone through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers address various topics in morphology, optimality theory, some special FSM families, weighted FSM algorithms, FSM representations, exploration, ordered structures, and surface parsing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, ISCSLP 2006, held in Singapore in December 2006, co-located with ICCPOL 2006, the 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages. Coverage includes speech science, acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition, speech data mining, and machine translation of speech.