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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2006, held in Singapore in December 2006, colocated with ISCSLP 2006, the 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing.

The 36 revised full papers and 20 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval, document classification, questions and answers, summarization, machine translation, word segmentation, chunking, abbreviation expansion, writing-system issues, parsing, semantics, and lexical resources.

Here are the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2006. The book presents 87 revised full papers together with 2 invited papers reviewing state-of-the-art research in the field of natural language processing. Coverage ranges from theoretical and methodological issues to applications with special focus on corpora, texts and transcription, speech analysis, recognition and synthesis, as well as their intertwining within NL dialogue systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, FinTAL 2006, held in Turku, Finland in August 2006. The book presents 72 revised full papers together with 1 invited talk and the extended abstracts of 2 invited keynote addresses. The papers address all current issues in computational linguistics and monolingual and multilingual intelligent language processing - theory, methods and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2006, held in Klagenfurt, Austria in May/June 2006 as part of UNISCON 2006. The book presents 17 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers, organized in topical sections on concepts extraction and ontology, ontologies and task repository utilization, query processing, information retrieval and dialog processing, and NLP techniques.

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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction held in July 2005. The 38 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal processing, HCI and applications, discourse and dialogue, emotion, visual processing, speech and audio processing, and NIST meeting recognition evaluation.

Refereed postproceedings of the International Conference on Non-Linear Speech Processing, NOLISP 2005. The 30 revised full papers presented together with one keynote speech and 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on speaker recognition, speech analysis, voice pathologies, speech recognition, speech enhancement, and applications.

The Theme of IJCNLP 2005: "NLP with Kimchee," a Conference with a Unique Flavor Welcometo IJCNLP 2005, thesecondannualconferenceof theAsian Federation ofNaturalLanguageProcessing(AFNLP). Followingthesuccessofthe?rstc- ference held in the beautiful cityof Sanya, Hainan Island, China, in March2004, IJCNLP 2005 is held in yet another attractive Asian resort, namely Jeju Island in Korea, on October 11-13, 2005 - the ideal place and season for appreciating mugunghwa, the rose of Sharon, and the national ?ower of Korea. On behalf of the Program Committee, we are excited to present these p- ceedings, which collect together the papers accepted for oral presentation at the conference. We received 289 submissions in total, from 32 economies all over the world: 77% from Asia, 11% from Europe, 0.3% from Africa, 1.7% from Australasia and 10% from North America. We are delighted to report that the popularity of IJCNLP has signi?cantly increased this year, with an increase of 37% from the 211 submissions from 16 economies and 3 continents received for IJCNLP 2004. With such a large number of submissions, the paper selection process was not easy. With the very considerable assistance of our 12 area chairs - Claire Gardent, Jamie Henderson, Chu-Ren Huang, Kentaro Inui, GaryLee, Kim-Teng Lua, Helen Meng, Diego Moll a, Jian-Yun Nie, Dragomir Radev, Manfred Stede, andMing Zhou- andthe 133internationalreviewers,90papers(31%)were- cepted for oral presentation and 62 papers (21%) were recommended as posters."

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

The ?fth campaign of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for Eu- pean languages was held from January to September 2004. Participation in the CLEF campaigns has increased each year and CLEF 2004 was no exception: 55 groups submitted results for one or more of the di?erent tracks compared with 42 groups in the previous year. CLEF 2004 also marked a breaking point with respect to previous campaigns. The focus was no longer mainly concentrated on multilingual document retrieval as in previous years but was diversi?ed to include di?erent kinds of text retrieval across languages (e. g. , exact answers in the question-answering track) and retrieval on di?erent kinds of media (i. e. , not just plain text but collections containing image and speech as well). In ad- tion, increasing attention was given to issues that regard system usability and user satisfaction with tasks to measure the e?ectiveness of interactive systems or system components being included in both the cross-language question - swering and image retrieval tasks with the collaboration of the coordinators of the interactive track. The campaign culminated in a two-and-a-half-day workshop held in Bath, UK, 15-17 September, immediately following the 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop was attended by nearly 100 researchers and s- tem developers.

This volume contains the ?nal proceedings of the 2004 Metainformatics Sym- sium (MIS 2004). The event was held during 15-18 September 2004 in Salzburg, Austria at Salzburg Research. MIS is an annual event focusing on ?nding common ground shared by - searchers and practitioners in many di?erent computer science areas who may use similar methods to achieve di?erent ends. The goal is to ?nd useful abstr- tions, notations, analytical frameworks, formalisms, and systems that improve ourunderstandingoftheunderlyingstructuresofvariousdisciplinesandfamilies of systems within computer science. Ideally these constructs should have usef- ness in conveying knowledge and understanding across disciplinary boundaries. The proceedings of previous MIS events were also published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series: LNCS 3002 (2003), LNCS 2641 (2002), LNCS 2266 (2001), and LNCS 1903 (2000). As with previous events in the MIS series, MIS 2004 attracted quality papers and brought together researchers from many di?erent ?elds within computer s- ence.WeexperiencedinterestingpresentationsandlivelydiscussionsinSalzburg. I hope that you will ?nd the papers contained in this volume as interesting as the other members of the Program Committee and I have. This volume would not have been possible without the help and assistance of many people. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Springereditors, AnnaKramerandChristineGun ] ther, andtheExecutiveEditor of the LNCS series, Alfred Hofmann.

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 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.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book inaugurates the new FoLLI LNAI subline. It constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL 2005, held in Bordeaux, France in April 2005.

The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from over 40 submissions. The papers address a wide range of logical and formal methods in computational linguistics with studies of particular grammar formalisms and their computational properties, language engineering, and traditional topics about the syntax/semantics interface.

Welcome to Santiago de Compostela! We are pleased to host the 27th Annual EuropeanConferenceonInformationRetrievalResearch(ECIR2005)onits?rst visit to Spain. These proceedings contain the refereed full papers and poster abstracts p- sented at ECIR 2005. This conference was initially established by the Infor- tion Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS-IRSG) under the name "Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research. " The colloquium was held in the United Kingdom each year until 1998, when the event was organized in Grenoble, France. Since then the conference venue has alternated between the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, re?ecting the growing European orientation of ECIR. For the same reason, in 2001 the event was renamed "European Conference on Information Retrieval Research. " In - cent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the ?eld of information retrieval. ECIR 2005 was held at the Technical School of Engineering of the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In terms of submissions, ECIR 2005 was a record-breaking success, since 124 full papers were submitted in response to the call for papers. This was a sharp increase from the 101 submissions received for ECIR 2003, which was the most successful ECIR in terms of submissions. ECIR 2005 established also a call for posters, and 41 posters where submitted. Paper and poster submissions were received from across Europe and further a?eld, including North America, South America, Asia and Australia, which is a clear indicationofthegrowingpopularityandreputationoftheconference.

Spoken dialog systems allow people to get information, conduct business, and be entertained, simply by speaking to a computer. There are hundreds of these systems currently in use, handling millions of interactions every day. How do they work? What problems do they solve? The goal of this book is to answer these questions and others like them, including:

How can I decide if a spoken dialog system is a good fit for the needs of my organization?

Whata (TM)s the difference between a voice user interface and a conventional graphical interface? What are the psychological principles underlying voice user interfaces? What do I need to know about error handling in voice applications and accommodating both novice and experienced users?

How can I make use of newer technologies like speaker authentication?

What about development tools? How can I evaluate and select the right tools?

What can I expect when deploying a spoken dialog system? How is deploying a spoken dialog system different from deploying a web application? What details do I have to be aware of for the deployment to succeed?

What can we expect these systems to do in the future? What kinds of new capabilities are about to emerge from research laboratories?

For professional speech researchers, there is a rich technical literature covering many years of primary research in speech. However, this literature is not necessarily applicable to the needs of business people, application developers, and students who are interested in learning about the practical uses of speech technology. On the other hand, while existing introductory resources cover the basic mechanics of development ofapplication development as well as aspects of the voice user interface, they dona (TM)t go far enough in dealing with the details that have to be taken into account to make spoken dialog systems successful in practice. Whata (TM)s missing is information in between the in-depth technical literature and the more introductory development resources. The goal of this book is to provide information for anyone who wants to take the next step beyond the basics of current speech applications but isna (TM)t yet ready to dive into the technical literature. It is hoped that this book will help project managers, application developers, and students gain a fuller and more complete understanding of spoken dialog technology and the practical aspects of developing and deploying spoken dialog applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation, TbiLLC 2019, held in Batumi, Georgia, in September 2019. The volume contains 17 full revised papers presented at the conference from 17 submissions. The scientific program consisted of tutorials, invited lectures, contributed talks, and two workshops. The symposium offered two tutorials in language and logic and aimed at students as well as researchers working in the other areas: * Language: Sign language linguistics. State of the art, by Fabian Bross (University of Stuttgart, Germany) * Logic: Axiomatic Semantics, by Graham E. Leigh (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

IJCNLP 2004 heralded a new era for computational linguistics and natural l- guage processing in Asia, as it coincided with the launching of the Asian F- eration of NLP Associations (AFNLP) in Sanya, Hainan, China. This was a timely development for the most populous and linguistically diversi?ed region in the world, and there is little wonder that this conference managed to draw over 200 participants. Following an enthusiastic response to the call for papers from 19regionsand the vigorousand rigorouse?ortsof the ProgramCommittee Co-chairs, the sizable collection of papers presented at this conference enabled AFNLP to be compared with related organizations such as COLING and ACL, which have been in existence for more than 40 years. Theorganizersrecognizedthatitisimportantforseriousattemptstobemade to increaseandimprovee?ortsinthis areaallacrossAsia.Towardsthisend, and to contribute to a better awarenessof topical issues, IJCNLP 2004 included two panels of special interest: (1) Panel on Emerging Asian Language Processing E?orts, and (2) Panel on Multilingual NLP for Public Information Services, which was devoted to the NLP requirements envisioned by the organizers of the 2008 Olympics. There were also two thematic sessions on (a) Natural Language TechnologyinMobileInformationRetrievalandTextProcessingUserInterfaces, and(b)TextMininginBiomedicine.Theo?eringsofthisconferencewerefurther enriched by tutorials and workshops as well as an Asian Symposium on Natural Language Processing to Overcome Language Barriers, organized as a satellite eventbytheInstitute ofElectronics, InformationandCommunicationEngineers (IEICE) and the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) of Japa

This book contains a selection of refereed papers presented at the 1st Wo- shop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI 2004), held at the "Centre du Parc," Martigny, Switzerland, during June 21-23, 2004. The workshop was organized and sponsored jointly by three European projects, - AMI, Augmented Multiparty Interaction, http: //www.amiproject.org - PASCAL, Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modeling and Computational Learning, http: //www.pascal-network.org - M4, Multi-modal Meeting Manager, http: //www.m4project.org as well as the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR): - IM2: Interactive Multimodal Information Management, http: //www.im2.ch MLMI 2004 was thus sponsored by the European Commission and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Given the multiple links between the above projects and several related - search areas, it was decided to organize a joint workshop bringing together - searchers from the di?erent communities working around the common theme of advanced machine learning algorithms for processing and structuring mul- modal human interaction in meetings. The motivation for creating such a forum, which could be perceived as a number of papers from di?erent research dis- plines, evolved from a real need that arose from these projects and the strong motivation of their partners for such a multidisciplinary workshop. This asse- ment was indeed con?rmed by the success of this ?rst MLMI workshop, which attracted more than 200 participants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.