Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools, and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable.

This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a series of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state of the field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.

This book explains how to build Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems--computer software systems that automatically generate understandable texts in English or other human languages. 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 is essential reading for researchers interested in NLP, AI, and HCI; and for developers interested in advanced document-creation technology.

CICLing 2005 (www.CICLing.org) was the 6th Annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. It was intended to provide a balanced view of the cutting-edge developments in both the theoretical foundations of computational linguistics and the practice of natural-language text processing with its numerous applications. A feature of CICLing conferences is their wide scope that covers nearly all areas of computational linguistics and all aspects of natural language processing applications. This year we were honored by the presence of our keynote speakers Christian Boitet (CLIPS-IMAG, Grenoble), Kevin Knight (ISI), Daniel Marcu (ISI), and Ellen Riloff (University of Utah), who delivered excellent extended lectures and organized vivid discussions and encouraging tutorials; their invited papers are published in this volume. Of 151 submissions received, 88 were selected for presentation; 53 as full papers and 35 as short papers, by exactly 200 authors from 26 countries: USA (15 papers); Mexico (12); China (9.5); Spain (7.5); South Korea (5.5); Singapore (5); Germany (4.8); Japan (4); UK (3.5); France (3.3); India (3); Italy (3); Czech Republic (2.5); Romania (2.3); Brazil, Canada, Greece, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland (1 each); Hong Kong (0.5); and Russia (0.5) including the invited papers. Internationally co-authored papers are counted in equal fractions.

Interested in how an efficient search engine works? Want to know what algorithms are used to rank resulting documents in response to user requests? The authors answer these and other key information retrieval design and implementation questions.

This book is not yet another high level text. Instead, algorithms are thoroughly described, making this book ideally suited for both computer science students and practitioners who work on search-related applications. As stated in the foreword, this book provides a current, broad, and detailed overview of the field and is the only one that does so. Examples are used throughout to illustrate the algorithms.

The authors explain how a query is ranked against a document collection using either a single or a combination of retrieval strategies, and how an assortment of utilities are integrated into the query processing scheme to improve these rankings. Methods for building and compressing text indexes, querying and retrieving documents in multiple languages, and using parallel or distributed processing to expedite the search are likewise described.

This edition is a major expansion of the one published in 1998. Besides updating the entire book with current techniques, it includes new sections on language models, cross-language information retrieval, peer-to-peer processing, XML search, mediators, and duplicate document detection.

Welcome to NLDB04, the Ninth International Conference on the Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, held at the University of Salford, UK d- ing June 23-25, 2004. NLDB04 follows on the success of previous conferences held since 1995. Early conferences then known as Application of Natural Language to Databases, hence the acronym NLDB, were used as a forum to discuss and disse- nate research on the integration of natural language and databases and were mainly concerned with natural language based queries, database modelling and user int- faces that facilitate access to information. The conference has since moved to enc- pass all aspects of Information Systems and Software Engineering. Indeed, the use of natural language in systems modelling has greatly improved the development process and benefited both developers and users at all stages of the software development process. The latest developments in the field of natural language and the emergence of new technologies has seen a shift towards storage of large semantic electronic dictionaries, their exploitation and the advent of what is now known as the semantic web. Inf- mation extraction and retrieval, document and content management, ontology dev- opment and management and natural language conversational systems are becoming regular tracks in the last NLDB conferences. NLDB04 has seen a 50% increase in the number of submissions and has est- lished itself as one of the leading conferences in the area of applying natural language to information systems in its broader sense.

This volume contains the papers that were accepted for presentation at the - ternationalConferenceonT X, XML, andDigitalTypography, jointlyheld with E the 25th Annual Meeting of the T X Users Group in Xanthi, Greece in the sum- E mer of2004.Theterm DigitalTypography refersto thepreparationofprinted matter using only electronic computers and electronic printing devices, such as laser-jetprinters.Thedocumentpreparationprocessinvolvesmainlytheuseofa digital typesetting system as well as data representation technologies. TXand E its o?spring are beyond doubt the most successful current digital typesetters, while XML is the standard for text-based data representation for both business and scienti?c activities. Allpapersappearinginthisvolumewerefullyrefereedbythemembersofthe program committee. The papers were carefully selected to re?ect the research work that is being done in the ?eld of digital typography using T X and/or its E o?spring. The problems for which comprehensivesolutions have been proposed include proper multilingual document preparation and XML document processing and generation. The proposed solutions deal not simply with typesetting issues, but also related issues in document preparation, such as the manipulation of c- plex bibliographic databases, and automatic conversion of text expressed in one grammaticalsystem to a more recent one (as for the Greek language, converting between monotonic Greek and polytonic Greek). The conference is being graciously hosted by the Democritus University of Thrace in Xanthi and by the Greek T X Friends. We wish to thank Basil K."

The Third International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2004) was held from 14th to 16th July 2004 at Careys Manor, Brockenhurst, UK. Supported by the Association for Computational Linguistics Special - terest Group on Generation, the conference continued a twenty-year tradition of biennial international meetings on research into natural language generation. Recent conference venues have included Mitzpe Ramon, Israel (INLG 2000) and New York, USA (INLG 2002). It was our pleasure to invite the thriving and friendly NLG research community to the beautiful New Forest in the south of England for INLG 2004. INLG is the leading international conference in the ?eld of natural language generation. It provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of the generation of language, including psychological modelling of human language production as well as computational approaches to the automatic generation of language. This volume includes a paper by the keynote speaker, Ardi Roelofs of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingu- tics and the F. C. Donders Centre for CognitiveNeuroimaging,18 regular papers reportingthelatestresearchresultsanddirections, and4studentpapersdescr- ing doctoral work in progress. These papers reveal a particular concentration of current research e?ort on statistical and machine learning methods, on referring expressions, and on variation in surface realisation. The papers were selected from 46 submissions from all over the world (27 from Europe, 13 from North America, 6 from elsewhere), which were subjected to a rigorous double-blind reviewing process undertaken by our hard-working programme committee

The International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) is an annual international forum that provides opportunities for librarians, researchers and experts to exchange their research results, innovative ideas, service experiences and state-- the-art developments in the field of digital libraries. Building on the success of the first six ICADL conferences, the 7th ICADL conference hosted by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Shanghai Library in Shanghai, China aimed to further strengthen the academic collaboration and strategic alliance in the Asia- Pacific Region in the development of digital libraries. The theme of ICADL 2004 was: Digital library: International Collaboration and Cross-fertilization, with its focus on technology, services, management and localization. The conference began with an opening ceremony and the conference program featured 9 keynote speeches and 5 invited speeches by local and international experts. During the 3-day program, 40 research paper presentations were given in 3 parallel sessions. The conference also included 6 tutorials and an exhibition. The conference received 359 submissions, comprising 248 full papers and 111 short papers. Each paper was carefully reviewed by the Program Committee members. Finally, 44 full papers, 15 short papers and 37 poster papers were selected. On behalf of the Organizing and Program Committees of ICADL 2004, we would like to express our appreciation to all authors and attendees for participating in the conference. We also thank the sponsors, Program Committee members, supporting organizations and helpers for making the conference a success. Without their efforts, the conference would not have been possible.

Human conversational partners are able, at least to a certain extent, to detect the speaker s or listener s emotional state and may attempt to respond to it accordingly. When instead one of the interlocutors is a computer a number of questions arise, such as the following: To what extent are dialogue systems able to simulate such behaviors? Can we learn the mechanisms of emotional be- viors from observing and analyzing the behavior of human speakers? How can emotionsbeautomaticallyrecognizedfromauser smimics, gesturesandspeech? What possibilities does a dialogue system have to express emotions itself? And, very importantly, would emotional system behavior be desirable at all? Given the state of ongoing research into incorporating emotions in dialogue systems we found it timely to organize a Tutorial and Research Workshop on A?ectiveDialogueSystems(ADS2004)atKlosterIrseein GermanyduringJune 14 16, 2004. After two successful ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops on Multimodal Dialogue Systems at the same location in 1999 and 2002, we felt that a workshop focusing on the role of a?ect in dialogue would be a valuable continuation of the workshop series. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, the workshop attracted submissions from researchers with very di?erent backgrounds and from many di?erent research areas, working on, for example, dialogue processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, embodied conversational agents, computer graphics, animation, user modelling, tutoring systems, cognitive systems, and human-computer inter- tion."

TheInternationalConferenceTSD 2005, the8theventin theseriesonText, Speech, and Dialogue, which originated in 1998, presented state-of-the-art technology and recent achievements in the ?eld of natural language processing. It declared its intent to be 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 acquainted with the current act- ities in all aspects of language communication and to witness the amazing vitality of researchers from developing countries too. The ?nancial support of the ISCA (Inter- tional Speech Communication Association) enabled the wide attendance of researchers from all active regions of the world. Thisyear sconferencewaspartiallyorientedtowardsmulti-modalhuman-computer interaction (HCI), which can be seen as the most attractive topic of HCI at the present time. In this way, we are involved in a rich complex of communicative activity, facial expressions, hand gestures, direction of gaze, to name but the most obvious ones. The interpretationof each user utterancedependson the context, prosody, facial expressions (e. g. brows raised, brows and gaze both raised) and gestures. Hearers have to adapt to the speaker (e. g. maintainingthe theme of the conversation, smiling etc. ). Research into the interaction of these channels is however limited, often focusing on the interaction between a pair of channels. Six signi?cant scienti?c results achieved in this area in the USA, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, and the Czech Republic were presented by keynote speakers in special plenary sessions. Further, appr

This volume contains invited and contributed papers presented at the 9th International Summer School "Neural Nets E.R. Caianiello" on Nonlinear Speech Processing: Al- rithms and Analysis, held in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy, during September 13-18, 2004. The aim of this book is to provide primarily high-level tutorial coverage of the ?elds related to nonlinear methods for speech processing and analysis, including new approaches aimed at improving speech applications. Fourteen surveys are offered by specialists in the ?eld. Consequently, the volume may be used as a reference book on nonlinear methods for speech processing and an- ysis. Also included are ?fteen papers that present original contributions in the ?eld and complete the tutorials. The volume is divided into ?ve sections: Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech S- nal, Acoustic-to-Articulatory Modeling of Speech Phenomena, Data Driven and Speech Processing Algorithms, Algorithms and Models Based on Speech Perception Mec- nisms, and Task-Oriented Speech Applications. Dealing with Nonlinearities in Speech Signals is an introductory section where n- linear aspects of the speech signal are introduced from three different points of view. The section includes three papers. The ?rst paper, authored by Anna Esposito and Maria Marinaro, is an attempt to introduce the concept of nonlinearity revising several nonl- ear phenomena observed in the acoustics, the production and the perception of speech. Also discussed is the engineering endeavor to model these phenomena.

This book presents a collection of papers on the issue of focus in its broadest sense. While commonly being considered as related to phenomena such as presupposition and anaphora, focusing is much more widely spread, and it is this pervasiveness that this collection addresses. The volume explicitly aims to bring together theoretical, psychological, and descriptive approaches to focus, at the same time maintaining the overall interest in how these notions apply to the larger problem of evolving some formal representation of the semantic aspects of linguistic content. The contributed papers to this volume have been reworked from a selection of original work presented at a conference held in 1994 in Schloss Wolfsbrunnen in Germany.

Mathematical theorem proving has undergone an impressive development during the last two decades, resulting in a variety of powerful systems for applications in mathematical deduction and knowledge processing. Natural language processing has become a topic of outstanding relevance in information technology, mainly due to the explosive growth of the Web, where by far the largest part of information is encoded in natural language documents.

This monograph focuses on the development of inference tools tailored to applications in natural language processing by demonstrating how the model generation paradigm can be used as a framework for the support of specific tasks in natural language interpretation and natural language based inference in a natural way.

The book appears at a pivotal moment, when much attention is being paid to the task of adding a semantic layer to the Web, and representation and processing of natural language based semantic information pops up as a primary requirement for further technological progress.

The 16th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching was held on Jeju Island, Korea on June 19-22, 2005. Previous meetings were held in Paris, London, Tucson, Padova, Asilomar, Helsinki, Laguna Beach, Aarhus, Piscataway, Warwick, Montreal, Jerusalem, Fukuoka, Morelia, and Istanbul over the years 1990-2004. In response to the call for papers, CPM 2005 received a record number of 129papers.Eachsubmissionwasreviewedbyatleast threeProgramCommittee members with the assistance of external referees. Since there were many hi- quality papers, the Program Committee's task was extremely di?cult. Through an extensive discussion the Program Committee accepted 37 of the submissions tobepresentedattheconference.Theyconstituteoriginalresearchcontributions in combinatorial pattern matching and its applications. Inadditiontotheselectedpapers, CPM2005hadthreeinvitedpresentations, by Esko Ukkonen from the University of Helsinki, Ming Li from the University of Waterloo, and Naftali Tishby from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We would like to thank all Program Committee members and external r- erees for their excellent work, especially given the demanding time constraints; they gave the conference its distinctive character. We also thank all who s- mitted papers for consideration; they all contributed to the high quality of the conference. Finally, we thank the Organizing Committee members and the graduates- dents who worked hard to put in place the logistical arrangements of the c- ference. It is their dedicated contribution that made the conference possible and enjoyable

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2004, under the auspices of the Masaryk University. This series of international conferences on text, speech and dialogue has come to c- stitute a major forum for presentation and discussion, not only of the latest developments in academic research in these ?elds, but also of practical and industrial applications. Uniquely, these conferences bring together researchers from a very wide area, both intellectually and geographically, including scientists working in speech technology, dialogue systems, text processing, lexicography, and other related ?elds. In recent years the conference has dev- oped into aprimary meetingplacefor speech and languagetechnologistsfrom manydifferent parts of the world and in particular it has enabled important and fruitful exchanges of ideas between Western and Eastern Europe. TSD 2004 offered a rich program of invited talks, tutorials, technical papers and poster sessions, aswellasworkshops andsystemdemonstrations. Atotalof78paperswereaccepted out of 127 submitted, contributed altogether by 190 authors from 26 countries. Our thanks as usual go to the Program Committee members and to the external reviewers for their conscientious and diligent assessment of submissions, and to the authors themselves for their high-quality contributions. We would also like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to all the members of the Organizing Committee for their tireless efforts in organizing the conference and ensuring its smooth running.

Originally published in 1997, this book is concerned with human language technology. This technology provides computers with the capability to handle spoken and written language. One major goal is to improve communication between humans and machines. If people can use their own language to access information, working with software applications and controlling machinery, the greatest obstacle for the acceptance of new information technology is overcome. Another important goal is to facilitate communication among people. Machines can help to translate texts or spoken input from one human language to the other. Programs that assist people in writing by checking orthography, grammar and style are constantly improving. This book was sponsored by the Directorate General XIII of the European Union and the Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation, USA.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2003, held in Groningen, The Netherlands in August 2003. The 94 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on analysis and understanding, video analysis, segmentation, shape, classification, face recognition, interpolation and spatial transformations, and filtering.

Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.

The International Conference TSD 2003, the sixth event in the series on Text, Speech, and Dialogue, which originated in 1998, presents state-of-the-art technology and - cent achievements in the ?eld of natural language processing. This year's conference includes invited talks given by top-class researchers (Frederick Jelinek from Johns H- kinsUniversityofBaltimore, SadaokiFuruifromtheUniversityofTechnologyinTokyo, President of ISCA, and Steven Krauwer from the Institute of Linguistics of Utrecht U- versity), plenary and problem-oriented sessions, as well as poster sessions and dem- strations involving 28 functional applications. The conference declares its intent to be an interdisciplinary forum, which intertwines researchinspeechandlanguageprocessingaswellasresearchintheEasternandWestern hemispheres. We feel that the mixture of different approaches and applications gives agreatopportunitytogetacquaintedwiththecurrentactivitiesinallaspectsoflanguage communication and to witness the amazing vitality of research from the former East Block countries. The ?nancial support of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) enables the wide attendance of researchers from all active regions of the world. This volume contains a collection of all the papers presented at the international conf- ence organized by the Faculty of Applied Sciences of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen in collaboration with the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno, ? and held in the beautiful city of Ceske Budejo ? vice (South Bohemia, Czech Republic), September 8-12, 2003. Each of the submitted papers was thoroughly reviewed by three membersoftheconferencereviewingteamconsistingofmorethan40world-famouss- cialists in the conference topic areas."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Smart Graphics, SG 2003, held in Heidelberg, Germany in July 2003. The 19 revised full papers and 7 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. The papers address smart graphics issues from the points of view of computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and fine art. The papers are organized in topical sections on graphical interaction, visualization techniques, virtual characters, and camera planning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2002, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2002.The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers present a wealth of state-of-the-art research and development results in the field of natural language processing with emphasis on text, speech, and spoken language, ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields, such as web information retrieval, the semantic Web, algorithmic learning, dialogue systems, etc.

This third volume documents the results achieved within a priority program on spatial cognition funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). The 23 revised full papers presented went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and reflect the increased interdisciplinary cooperation in the area. The papers are organized in topical sections on routes and navigation, human memory and learning, spatial representation, and spatial reasoning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference PorTAL 2002 - Portugal for Natural Language Processing, held in Faro, Portugal, in June 2002.The 23 reviewed regular papers and 11 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pragmatics, discourse, semantics, and the lexicon; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; language-oriented information retrieval, question answering, summarization, and information extraction; language-oriented machine learning; multi-lingual processing, machine translation, and translation aids; natural language interfaces and dialogue systems; tools and resources; and evaluation of systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2002, held in Stockholm, Sweden in June 2002.The 17 revised full papers and 7 revised short papers presented were carefully selected from 42 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on linguistic aspects of modeling, information retrieval, natural language text understanding, knowledge bases, recognition of information in natural language descriptions, and natural language conversational systems.

Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation is of relevance to researchers and program developers in the field of Machine Translation and especially Example-Based Machine Translation, bilingual text processing and cross-linguistic information retrieval. It is also of interest to translation technologists and localisation professionals.

Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation fills a void, because it is the first book to tackle the issue of EBMT in depth. It gives a state-of-the-art overview of EBMT techniques and provides a coherent structure in which all aspects of EBMT are embedded. Its contributions are written by long-standing researchers in the field of MT in general, and EBMT in particular. This book can be used in graduate-level courses in machine translation and statistical NLP.