This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2009, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2009. The 52 revised and in many cases substantially extended papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections on speech processing, computational morphology/lexicography, parsing, computational semantics, dialogue modeling and processing, digital language resources, WordNet, document processing, information processing, and machine translation.

This book is based on the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Structures of Com munication and Intelligent Help for Hypermedia Courseware, which was held at Espinho, Portugal, April 19-24, 1990. The texts included here should not be regarded as untouched proceedings of this meeting, but as the result of the reflections which took place there and which led the authors to revise their texts in that light. The Espinho ARW was itself to some extent the continuation of the ARW on Designing Hypermedia/Hypertext for Learning, held in Germany in 1989 (D. H. Jonassen, H. Mandl (eds.): Designing Hypermedia for Learning. NATO ASI Series F, Vol. 67. Springer 1990). At that meeting an essential conclusion becarne apparent: the importance and interest of hyper media products as potential pedagogical tools. It was then already predictable that the enormous evolution of hypermedia would lead to its association with multimedia technologies, namely for the production of courseware. Parallel to the improvement of the didactic potential and quality which results from this association, it nevertheless brought along a natural array of difficulties, some old, some new, in the con ception and use of hypermedia products. Today there is agreement that one of the most promising technological advances for education is represented by the use of text, sound and images based on nonlinear techniques of information handling and searching of hypermedia architectures. The problem of hypermedia is fundamentally one of communication; this leads to an attempt at defining a language for hypermedia.

This book contains the reports of selected projects involving natural language commu nication with pictorial information systems. More than just a record of research results, however, it presents concrete applications to the solution of a wide variety of problems. The authors are all prominent figures in the field whose authoritative contributions help ensure its continued expansion in both size and significance. Y. C. Lee and K S. Fu (Purdue University, USA) survey picture query languages which form an interface between the pictorial database system and the user and support infor mation retrieval, data entry and manipulation, data analysis and output generation. They include explicit picture query languages that augment alphanumeric data query langua ges as well as languages and command sets which are implicitly embedded in a pictorial information system but perform similar functions. It is worth mentioning that some forms of query languages can be transformed from a given set of natural language senten ces by using ATN (Augmented Transition Networks), which consequently allows for na turallanguage communication with information system."

In 1989, the ISO Standard 8613 "Office Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange Format" was published. The Standard is intended for the interchange of documents in an Open Systems environment. ISO 8613 is technically identical to the CCITT Recommendations of the T.410 series called "Open Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange Format" published in 1988. Almost all major companies in the office automation and telecommunication area are currently developing products based on this Standard. In this book, all important aspects of the presently publishedeight parts of the Standard are discussed. The book provides a comprehensiveand detailed introduction to the technical specifications of ISO 8613 and the concepts on which these specifications are based, including the extensions which were added to the ODA Standard in 1991. The book isprimarily addressed to readers who want to investigate the applicability of the Standard for their document interchange problems, plan to acquire products based on the Standard, or intend to develop document processingsystems conforming to the Standard.

This volume in the Basic Research Series consists of the proceedings of the Symposium on Natural Language and Speech held during the ESPRIT Conference of November 1991 - a conference that serves to open up ESPRIT results not only to the ESPRIT community but also to the entire European IT industry and its users. The symposium is organised by the newly launched Network of Excellence on Language and Speech (3701) which brings together the foremost European experts and institutions in these two domains. By bringing together these two communities, which have so far been working in relative isolation from each other, the network aims to augment the focusing of research onto the long-term goal of the "construction of an integrated model of the cognitive chain linking speech to reasoning via natural language." To advance towards this industrially significant goal, the network operates at different levels - a strategy for research, a coordination for the training of needed researchers and a coordination of the use of its resource and communication infrastructure for the most efficient interworking of the members of the community who are spread all over Europe. This symposium is a small but significant building block for the achievement of the goals of the network.

Franciska de Jong and Jan Landsbergen Jan Landsbergen 2 A compositional definition of the translation relation Jan Odijk 3 M-grammars Jan Landsbergen and Franciska de Jong 4 The translation process Lisette Appelo 5 The Rosetta characteristics Joep Rous and Harm Smit 6 Morphology Jan Odijk, Harm Smit and Petra de Wit 7 Dictionaries Jan Odijk 8 Syntactic rules Modular and controlled Lisette Appelo 9 M-grammars Compositionality and syntactic Jan Odijk 10 generalisations Jan Odijk and Elena Pinillos Bartolome 11 Incorporating theoretical linguistic insights Lisette Appelo 12 Divergences between languages Lisette Appelo 13 Categorial divergences Translation of temporal Lisette Appelo 14 expressions Andre Schenk 15 Idioms and complex predicates Lisette Appelo and Elly van Munster 16 Scope and negation Rene Leermakers and Jan Landsbergen 17 The formal definition of M-grammars Rene Leermakers and Joep Rous 18 An attribute grammar view Theo Janssen 19 An algebraic view Rene Leermakers 20 Software engineering aspects Jan Landsbergen 21 Conclusion Contents 1 1 Introduction 1. 1 Knowledge needed for translation . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1. 1. 1 Knowledge of language and world knowledge 2 1. 1. 2 Formalisation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1. 1. 3 The underestimation of linguistic problems . 5 1. 1. 4 The notion of possible translation . 5 1. 2 Applications. . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. 3 A linguistic perspective on MT 9 1. 3. 1 Scope of the project 9 1. 3. 2 Scope of the book 11 1. 4 Organisation of the book . .

This book is a revised version of my doctoral thesis which was submitted in April 1993. The main extension is a chapter on evaluation of the system de scribed in Chapter 8 as this is clearly an issue which was not treated in the original version. This required the collection of data, the development of a concept for diagnostic evaluation of linguistic word recognition systems and, of course, the actual evaluation of the system itself. The revisions made primarily concern the presentation of the latest version of the SILPA system described in an additional Subsection 8. 3, the development environment for SILPA in Sec tion 8. 4, the diagnostic evaluation of the system as an additional Chapter 9. Some updates are included in the discussion of phonology and computation in Chapter 2 and finite state techniques in computational phonology in Chapter 3. The thesis was designed primarily as a contribution to the area of compu tational phonology. However, it addresses issues which are relevant within the disciplines of general linguistics, computational linguistics and, in particular, speech technology, in providing a detailed declarative, computationally inter preted linguistic model for application in spoken language processing. Time Map Phonology is a novel, constraint-based approach based on a two-stage temporal interpretation of phonological categories as events."

Most of the books about computational (lexical) semantic lexicons deal with the depth (or content) aspect of lexicons, ignoring the breadth (or coverage) aspect. This book presents a first attempt in the community to address both issues: content and coverage of computational semantic lexicons, in a thorough manner. Moreover, it addresses issues which have not yet been tackled in implemented systems such as the application time of lexical rules. Lexical rules and lexical underspecification are also contrasted in implemented systems. The main approaches in the field of computational (lexical) semantics are represented in the present book (including Wordnet, CyC, Mikrokosmos, Generative Lexicon). This book embraces several fields (and subfields) as different as: linguistics (theoretical, computational, semantics, pragmatics), psycholinguistics, cognitive science, computer science, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, statistics and natural language processing. The book also constitutes a very good introduction to the state of the art in computational semantic lexicons of the late 1990s.

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."

This work is Volume II of a two-volume monograph on the theory of deterministic parsing of context-free grammars. Volume I, "Languages and Parsing" (Chapters 1 to 5), was an introduction to the basic concepts of formal language theory and context-free parsing. Volume II (Chapters 6 to 10) contains a thorough treat ment of the theory of the two most important deterministic parsing methods: LR(k) and LL(k) parsing. Volume II is a continuation of Volume I; together these two volumes form an integrated work, with chapters, theorems, lemmas, etc. numbered consecutively. Volume II begins with Chapter 6 in which the classical con structions pertaining to LR(k) parsing are presented. These include the canonical LR(k) parser, and its reduced variants such as the LALR(k) parser and the SLR(k) parser. The grammarclasses for which these parsers are deterministic are called LR(k) grammars, LALR(k) grammars and SLR(k) grammars; properties of these grammars are also investigated in Chapter 6. A great deal of attention is paid to the rigorous development of the theory: detailed mathematical proofs are provided for most of the results presented."

Parallel and Distributed Information Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Parallel and Distributed Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

The ship has left the Miraflores Locks, let loose from the 'mules' run by the crews of the Panama Canal Commission. She has picked up speed while passing under the Bridge of the Americas which links de facto the Northern and Southern parts of the continent, and has headed resolutely towards the Pacific Ocean waters along the rows of boats of all kinds waiting to cross the Canal in the other direction. Through a layer of tropical clouds, the setting Sun is bleakly illuminating the tall white highrises of Panama City on the port side. It took a full day to cautiously move through the whole system of locks and cuts. Back in the stateroom, I open again a working copy of this book and type down this foreword on the pocket computer. The last chapter was received the day before while speeding through the Caribbean Sea and my main work as Editor is now over. It has been a real pleasure and a great honour to be given the oppor tunity of compiling this book and interacting with the various contributors through the latest technologies while being sometimes in geographically very different places. The quality of the authors, the scope of experiences they cover, the messages they convey make of this book a unique and timely publication. The reader will certainly enjoy as much as I did going through such a variety of well-inspired chapters from so many different horizons.

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 graduate-level text lays out the foundation of DSP for audio and the fundamentals of auditory perception, then goes on to discuss immersive audio rendering and synthesis, the digital equalization of room acoustics, and various DSP implementations. It covers a variety of topics and up-to-date results in immersive audio processing research: immersive audio synthesis and rendering, multichannel room equalization, audio selective signal cancellation, multirate signal processing for audio applications, surround sound processing, psychoacoustics and its incorporation in audio signal processing algorithms for solving various problems, and DSP implementations of audio processing algorithms on semiconductor devices.

This book includes a set of selected papers from the first "International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems," (ICEIS'99) held in SeUtbal, Portugal, from 27 to 30 March 1999. ICEIS focuses on real world applications and aims at becoming a major point of contact between research scientists, engineers and practitioners in the area of business applications of information systems. This year four simultaneous tracks were held, covering different aspects related to enterprise computing, including: Systems Analysis and Specijication, Database Technology and its Applications, Artijicial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, and Internet and Intranet Computing. Although ICEIS'99 received more than 200 submissions, only 96 papers were accepted for oral presentation and only 24 were selected for inclusion in this book. These numbers demonstrate stringent quality criteria and the intention of maintaining a high quality forum for future editions ofthis conference. A number of additional keynote lectures, case studies and technical tutorials were also held. These presentations, by specialists in different knowledge areas made an important contribution to increase the overall quality of the Conference, and are partially expressed in the first two papers of the book."

This book covers content recognition in text, elaborating on past and current most successful algorithms and their application in a variety of settings: news filtering, mining of biomedical text, intelligence gathering, competitive intelligence, legal information searching, and processing of informal text. Today, there is considerable interest in integrating the results of information extraction in retrieval systems, because of the demand for search engines that return precise answers to flexible information queries.

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."

The material in this book was presented in the tutorial programme of the Eurographics '87 Conference, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1987. The book contains eight contributions, from leading experts in each field. Major aspects of computer graphics fundamentals, interactive techniques and three-dimensional modelling techniques are discussed and a state-of-the-art survey on the increasingly important area of desktop publishing is given. The theory of fractals is covered by presenting a thorough treatment of their mathematics and programming. Furthermore, overviews of several topics, such as the theory and methods of modelling three-dimensional shapes and objects, the fundamental concepts and current advances in user interface management systems, and existing CAD-interface specifications, are included. The book will be of interest to systems designers, application programmers and researchers who wish to gain a deeper knowledge of the state-of-the-art in the areas covered.

This book describes the framework of inductive dependency parsing, a methodology for robust and efficient syntactic analysis of unrestricted natural language text. Coverage includes a theoretical analysis of central models and algorithms, and an empirical evaluation of memory-based dependency parsing using data from Swedish and English. A one-stop reference to dependency-based parsing of natural language, it will interest researchers and system developers in language technology, and is suitable for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses.

This book introduces a theory, Naive Semantics (NS), a theory of the knowledge underlying natural language understanding. The basic assumption of NS is that knowing what a word means is not very different from knowing anything else, so that there is no difference in form of cognitive representation between lexical semantics and ency clopedic knowledge. NS represents word meanings as commonsense knowledge, and builds no special representation language (other than elements of first-order logic). The idea of teaching computers common sense knowledge originated with McCarthy and Hayes (1969), and has been extended by a number of researchers (Hobbs and Moore, 1985, Lenat et aI, 1986). Commonsense knowledge is a set of naive beliefs, at times vague and inaccurate, about the way the world is structured. Traditionally, word meanings have been viewed as criterial, as giving truth conditions for membership in the classes words name. The theory of NS, in identifying word meanings with commonsense knowledge, sees word meanings as typical descriptions of classes of objects, rather than as criterial descriptions. Therefore, reasoning with NS represen tations is probabilistic rather than monotonic. This book is divided into two parts. Part I elaborates the theory of Naive Semantics. Chapter 1 illustrates and justifies the theory. Chapter 2 details the representation of nouns in the theory, and Chapter 4 the verbs, originally published as "Commonsense Reasoning with Verbs" (McDowell and Dahlgren, 1987). Chapter 3 describes kind types, which are naive constraints on noun representations."

A history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the field is the subject of this book. It details the deep differences between rival groups on how best to do MT, and presents a global perspective covering historical and contemporary systems in Europe, the US and Japan. The author considers MT as a fundamental part of Artificial Intelligence and the ultimate test-bed for all computational linguistics.

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."

Fuzzy modeling usually comes with two contradictory requirements: interpretability, which is the capability to express the real system behavior in a comprehensible way, and accuracy, which is the capability to faithfully represent the real system. In this framework, one of the most important areas is linguistic fuzzy modeling, where the legibility of the obtained model is the main objective. This task is usually developed by means of linguistic (Mamdani) fuzzy rule-based systems. An active research area is oriented towards the use of new techniques and structures to extend the classical, rigid linguistic fuzzy modeling with the main aim of increasing its precision degree. Traditionally, this accuracy improvement has been carried out without considering the corresponding interpretability loss. Currently, new trends have been proposed trying to preserve the linguistic fuzzy model description power during the optimization process. Written by leading experts in the field, this volume collects some representative researcher that pursue this approach.

Before designing a speech application system, three key questions have to be answered: who will use it, why and how often? This book focuses on these high-level questions and gives a criteria of when and how to design speech systems. After an introduction, the state-of-the-art in modern voice user interfaces is displayed. The book goes on to evolve criteria for designing and evaluating successful voice user interfaces. Trends in this fast growing area are also presented.

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