Automated Speaking Assessment: Using Language Technologies to Score Spontaneous Speech provides a thorough overview of state-of-the-art automated speech scoring technology as it is currently used at Educational Testing Service (ETS). Its main focus is related to the automated scoring of spontaneous speech elicited by TOEFL iBT Speaking section items, but other applications of speech scoring, such as for more predictable spoken responses or responses provided in a dialogic setting, are also discussed. The book begins with an in-depth overview of the nascent field of automated speech scoring-its history, applications, and challenges-followed by a discussion of psychometric considerations for automated speech scoring. The second and third parts discuss the integral main components of an automated speech scoring system as well as the different types of automatically generated measures extracted by the system features related to evaluate the speaking construct of communicative competence as measured defined by the TOEFL iBT Speaking assessment. Finally, the last part of the book touches on more recent developments, such as providing more detailed feedback on test takers' spoken responses using speech features and scoring of dialogic speech. It concludes with a discussion, summary, and outlook on future developments in this area. Written with minimal technical details for the benefit of non-experts, this book is an ideal resource for graduate students in courses on Language Testing and Assessment as well as teachers and researchers in applied linguistics.

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

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

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

Distribution of anaphora in natural language and the complexity of its resolution have resulted in a wide range of disciplines focusing their research on this grammatical phenomenon. It has emerged as one of the most productive topics of multi- and int- disciplinary research such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence and human language technology, theoretical, cognitive, corpus and computational linguistics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Anaphora plays a major role in understanding a language and also accounts for the cohesion of a text. Correct interpretation of anaphora is necessary in all high-level natural language pr- essing applications. Given the growing importance of the study of anaphora in the last few decades, it has emerged as the frontier area of research. This is evident from the high-quality th submissions received for the 7 DAARC from where the 10 excellent reports on - search findings are selected for this volume. These are the regular papers that were presented at DAARC.

Thebookpresentsa cross-sectionofstate-of-the-artresearchonmultimodalc- pora, a highly interdisciplinary area that is a prerequisite for various specialized disciplines. A number of the papers included are revised and expanded versions ofpapersacceptedtotheInternationalWorkshoponMultimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications, held in conjunction th with the 6 International Conference for Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) on May 27, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco. This international workshop series started in 2000 and has since then grown into a regular satellite event of the bi-annual LREC conference, attracting researchers from ?elds as diverse as psychology, arti?cial intelligence, robotics, signal processing, computational linguisticsandhuman-computerinteraction. Tocomplement theselected papers from the 2008 workshop, we invited well-known researchers from corpus coll- tioninitiativestocontributetothisvolume. Wewereabletoobtainseveninvited research articles, including contributions from major international multimodal corpus projects like AMI and SmartWeb, which complement the six selected workshop contributions. All papers underwent a special review process for this volume, resulting in signi?cant revisions and extensions based on the experts' advice. While we were pleased that the 2006 edition of the workshop resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, published in 2007, we felt that this was the time for another major publication, given not onlytherapidprogressandincreasedinterestin this researchareabut especially in order to acknowledge the di?culty of disseminating results across discipline borders. The Springer LNAI series is the perfect platform for doing so. We also created the website www. multimodal-corpora.

The ninth campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2008. There were seven main eval- tion tracks in CLEF 2008 plus two pilot tasks. The aim, as usual, was to test the p- formance of a wide range of multilingual information access (MLIA) systems or s- tem components. This year, 100 groups, mainly but not only from academia, parti- pated in the campaign. Most of the groups were from Europe but there was also a good contingent from North America and Asia plus a few participants from South America and Africa. Full details regarding the design of the tracks, the methodologies used for evaluation, and the results obtained by the participants can be found in the different sections of these proceedings. The results of the CLEF 2008 campaign were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Aarhus, Denmark, September 17-19, and attended by 150 resear- ers and system developers. The annual workshop, held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries, plays an important role by providing the opportunity for all the groups that have participated in the evaluation campaign to get together comparing approaches and exchanging ideas. The schedule of the workshop was divided between plenary track overviews, and parallel, poster and breakout sessions presenting this year's experiments and discu- ing ideas for the future. There were several invited talks.

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term "Information Society Age" seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

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

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

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

This volume collects the papers selected for presentation at the Third Inter- tional Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2009), held in Milan at the University of Milano-Bicocca (October 1-2, 2009). Metadataandsemanticresearchistodayagrowingcomplexsetofconceptual, theoretical, methodological, and technological frameworks, o?ering innovative computational solutions in the design and development of computer-based s- tems.Fromthis perspective,researchersworkinginthisareamusttackleabroad range of issues on methods, results, and solutions coming from di?erent classic areas of this discipline. The conference has been designed as a forum allowing researchers to present and discuss specialized results as general contributions to the ?eld. In order to give a novelperspective in which both theoreticaland application aspects of metadata research contribute in the growth of the area, this book mirrors the structure of the conference, grouping the papers into three main categories: (1) Theoretical Research: Results and Proposals; (2) Applications: Case Studies and Proposals; (3) Special Track: Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture,FoodandEnvironment.Thebookcontains31fullpapers(10forthe ? rstcategory,10forthesecondand12forthethird),selectedfromapreliminary initial set of about 70 submissions. Many people contributed to the success of the conference and the creation of this volume, from the initial idea to its implementation. Our ?rst ackno- edgement is to the members of the Steering Commitee, GeorgeBokosand David Raitt. We would also like to thank all Program Committee members and - viewers for their collaboration. Special thanks to Carlo Batini, on behalf of the DepartmentofComputerScience,SystemsandCommunicationoftheUniversity of Milan-Bicocca, who kindly hosted our conference.

For many years Leonard Bolc has played an important role in the Polish computer science community. He is especially known for his clear vision in the development of artificial intelligence, inspiring research, organizational and editorial achievements in areas such as e.g.: logic, automatic reasoning, natural language processing, and computer applications of natural language or human-like reasoning.

This Festschrift volume, published to honor Leonard Bolc on his 75th birthday includes 17 refereed papers by leading researchers, his friends, former students and colleagues to celebrate his scientific career. The essays present research in the areas which Leonard Bolc and his colleagues investigated during his long scientific career.

The volume is organized in three parts; the first is devoted to logic - the domain which was one of the most explored by Leonard Bolc himself. The second part contains papers focusing on different aspects of computational linguistics; the third part comprises papers describing different applications in which natural language processing or automatic reasoning plays an important role.

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

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the 4th volume of the FoLLI LNAI subline; containing the refereed proceedings of the 16h International Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation, WoLLIC 2009, held in Tokyo, Japan, in June 2009.

The 25 revised full papers presented together with six tutorials and invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The papers cover some of the most active areas of research on the frontiers between computation, logic, and linguistics, with particular interest in cross-disciplinary topics. Typical areas of interest are: foundations of computing and programming; novel computation models and paradigms; broad notions of proof and belief; formal methods in software and hardware development; logical approach to natural language and reasoning; logics of programs, actions and resources; foundational aspects of information organization, search, flow, sharing, and protection.

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

We are pleased to present this LNCS volume, the Proceedings of the 22nd A- tralasianJointConferenceonArti?cialIntelligence(AI2009), heldinMelbourne, Australia, December 1-4,2009.This long established annual regionalconference is a forum both for the presentation of researchadvances in arti?cial intelligence and for scienti?c interchange amongst researchers and practitioners in the ?eld of arti?cial intelligence. Conference attendees were also able to enjoy AI 2009 being co-located with the Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM 2009) and the 4th Australian Conference on Arti?cial Life (ACAL 2009). This year AI 2009 received 174 submissions, from authors of 30 di?erent countries. After an extensive peer review process where each submitted paper was rigorously reviewed by at least 2 (and in most cases 3) independent revi- ers, the best 68 papers were selected by the senior Program Committee for oral presentation at the conference and included in this volume, resulting in an - ceptance rate of 39%. The papers included in this volume cover a wide range of topics in arti?cial intelligence: from machine learning to natural language s- tems, from knowledge representation to soft computing, from theoretical issues to real-world applications. AI 2009 also included 11 tutorials, available through the First Australian Computational Intelligence Summer School (ACISS 2009). These tutorials - some introductory, some advanced - covered a wide range of research topics within arti?cial intelligence, including data mining, games, evolutionary c- putation, swarm optimization, intelligent agents, Bayesian and belief networks

This volume contains the proceedings of NOLISP 2009, an ISCA Tutorial and Workshop on Non-Linear Speech Processing held at the University of Vic (- talonia, Spain) during June 25-27, 2009. NOLISP2009wasprecededbythreeeditionsofthisbiannualeventheld2003 in Le Croisic (France), 2005 in Barcelona, and 2007 in Paris. The main idea of NOLISP workshops is to present and discuss new ideas, techniques and results related to alternative approaches in speech processing that may depart from the mainstream. In order to work at the front-end of the subject area, the following domains of interest have been de?ned for NOLISP 2009: 1. Non-linear approximation and estimation 2. Non-linear oscillators and predictors 3. Higher-order statistics 4. Independent component analysis 5. Nearest neighbors 6. Neural networks 7. Decision trees 8. Non-parametric models 9. Dynamics for non-linear systems 10. Fractal methods 11. Chaos modeling 12. Non-linear di?erential equations The initiative to organize NOLISP 2009 at the University of Vic (UVic) came from the UVic Research Group on Signal Processing and was supported by the Hardware-Software Research Group. We would like to acknowledge the ?nancial support obtained from the M- istry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN), University of Vic, ISCA, and EURASIP. All contributions to this volume are original. They were subject to a doub- blind refereeing procedure before their acceptance for the workshop and were revised after being presented at NOLISP 2009.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

This volume contains the full and short papers of SAMT 2009, the 4th Int- national Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies 2009 held in Graz, Austria. SAMT brings together researchers dealing with a broad range of research topics related to semantic multimedia and a great diversity of application - eas. The current research shows that adding and using semantics of multimedia content is broadening its scope from search and retrieval to the complete media life cycle, from content creation to distribution and consumption, thus lever- ing new possibilities in creating, sharing and reusing multimedia content. While some of the contributions present improvements in automatic analysis and - notation methods, there is increasingly more work dealing with visualization, user interaction and collaboration. We can also observe ongoing standardization activities related to semantic multimedia in both W3C and MPEG, forming a solid basis for a wide adoption. Theconferencereceived41submissionsthisyear, ofwhichtheProgramC- mittee selected 13 full papers for oral presentation and 8 short papers for poster presentation. In addition to the scienti?c papers, the conference program - cluded two invited talks by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Stefan Rug ] er and a demo session showing results from three European projects. The day before the main conference o?ered an industry day with presen- tions and demos that showed the growing importance of semantic technologies in real-world applications as well as the research challenges coming from them."

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."

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, IbPRIA 2009, held in Povoa de Varzim, Portugal in June 2009.

The 33 revised full papers and 29 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer vision, image analysis and processing, as well as pattern recognition.