Natural Semantics has become a popular tool among programming language researchers for specifying many aspects of programming languages. However, due to the lack of practical tools for implementation, the natural semantics formalism has so far largely been limited to theoretical applications.
This book introduces the rational meta-language RML as a practical language for natural semantics specifications. The main part of the work is devoted to the problem of compiling natural semantics, actually RML, into highly efficient code. For this purpose, an effective compilation strategy for RML is developed and implemented in the rml2c compiler. This compiler ultimately produces low-level C code. Benchmarking results show that rml2c-produced code is much faster than code resulting from compilers based on alternative implementation approaches.

ThisvolumecontainsaselectionofpaperspresentedattheInternationalConf- ence on Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods (TABLEAUX'99) held on June 7-11, 1999 at the Inn at Saratoga, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA. This conference was the continuation of international meetings on Theorem Proving with A- lytic Tableaux and Related Methods held in Lautenbach near Karlsruhe (1992), Marseille (1993), Abingdon near Oxford (1994), St. Goar near Koblenz (1995), Terrasini near Palermo (1996), Pont-' a-Mousson near Nancy (1997), and Oist- wijk near Tilburg (1998). TABLEAUX'99 marks the ?rst time the conference has been held in North America. Tableau and related methods have been found to be convenient and e?ective for automating deduction in various non-standard logics as well as in classical logic. Examples taken from this meeting alone include temporal, description, tense, quantum, modal, projective, hybrid, intuitionistic, and linear logics. - eas of application include veri?cation of software and computer systems, ded- tive databases, knowledge representation and its required inference engines, and system diagnosis. The conference brought together researchers interested in all aspects - theoretical foundations, implementation techniques, systems devel- ment and applications - of the mechanization of reasoning with tableaux and related methods.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI-98, held in Ames, Iowa, in July 1998.
The 23 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book from a total of 35 submissions. The book addresses a wide range of grammatical inference theory such as automata induction, grammar induction, automatic language acquisition, etc. as well as a variety of applications in areas like syntactic pattern recognition, adaptive intelligent agents, diagnosis, computational biology, data mining, and knowledge discovery.

The journey towards the autonomous enterprise has begun; there are already companies operating in a highly automated way. Every corporate decision-maker will need to understand the opportunities and risks that the autonomous enterprise presents, to learn how best to navigate the shifting competitive landscape on their journey of change. This book is your guide to this innovation, presenting the concepts in real world contexts by covering the art of the possible today and providing glimpses into the future of business.

Machine Translation and the Information Soup! Over the past fty years, machine translation has grown from a tantalizing dream to a respectable and stable scienti c-linguistic enterprise, with users, c- mercial systems, university research, and government participation. But until very recently, MT has been performed as a relatively distinct operation, so- what isolated from other text processing. Today, this situation is changing rapidly. The explosive growth of the Web has brought multilingual text into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer. We live in a soup of information, an increasingly multilingual bouillabaisse. And to partake of this soup, we can use MT systems together with more and more tools and language processing technologies|information retrieval engines, - tomated text summarizers, and multimodal and multilingual displays. Though some of them may still be rather experimental, and though they may not quite t together well yet, it is clear that the future will o er text manipulation systems that contain all these functions, seamlessly interconnected in various ways.

Nachdem die letztjiihrige DAGM-Tagung an der iiltesten Universitat Deutsch- lands stattfand, freut es uns, daJ3 wir das diesjahrige Mustererkennungs-Sym- posium jetzt an Deutschlands altester Technischer Universitat nun schon zum zweitenmal veranstalten durfen. An der Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig (gegrundet im Jahre 1745) ist Forschung auf den Gebieten der Mustererken- nung, der Sprachverarbeitung und der Bildverarbeitung schon seit Jahrzehnten im Institut fiir Nachrichtentechnik (INT) beheimatet. Seit 1986 wird am Institut fiir Robotik und Prozefiinformatik (IRP) auf den Gebieten der aktiven optischen 3D Oberflachenerfassung und der Analyse von Tiefendaten fiir vision-gestutzte Robotikanwendungen geforscht. Daneben gibt es an der Technischen Universitat sowie an den Forschungseinrichtungen der Region eine Vielzahl von Bereichen, in denen Methoden der Mustererkennung in unterschiedlichsten Anwendungsgebie- ten fur den praktischen Einsatz vorbereitet werden; diese reichen von melkenden Robotern bis hin zur sichtgestutzten automatischen Navigation von Helikoptern und zu Anwendungen in der virtuellen Medizin. Von insgesamt 90 eingereichten Beitragen wurden yom Programmkomitee 34 als Vortrag und 30 zur Posterprasentation angenommen. Die Beitrage uberdecken - wie in fruheren Jahren auch - das gesamte Spektrum des von der DAGM be- treuten Themengebietes: Von den theoretischen Grundlagen, Musterinvarianten, neuronalen Netzen uber die Bildsegmentierung bis hin zur Erkennung in und Interpretation von statischen und dynamischen 3D Szenen. Auch Beitrage zur Schrift- und Spracherkennung sind wiederum wesentlicher Bestandteil des Pro- gramms. Bei den Anwendungen ist dieses Jahr insbesondere der medizinische Bereich stark vertreten.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL '96, held in Nancy, France in April 1996.
The volume presents 18 revised full papers carefully selected and reviewed for inclusion in the book together with four invited contributions by leading authorities and an introductory survey with a detailed bibliography. The papers cover all relevant logical aspects of computational linguistics like logical inference, grammars, logical semantics, natural language processing, formal proofs, logic programming, type theory, etc.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop documentation of the ECAI'96 Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems, held in Budapest, Hungary, in August 1996, during ECAI'96.
The volume presents 16 revised full papers including a detailed introduction and survey paper by the volume editors. The papers are organized in sections on foundations of spoken language dialogue systems, dialogue systems and prosodic aspects of spoken dialogue processing, spoken dialogue systems-design and implementation, and evaluation of systems. The book reports on work being pursued both in academia and in industry as a crucial issue in speech processing.

This is an exciting time for Artificial Intelligence, and for Natural Language Processing in particular. Over the last five years or so, a newly revived spirit has gained prominence that promises to revitalize the whole field: the spirit of empiricism.
This book introduces a new approach to the important NLP issue of automatic ambiguity resolution, based on statistical models of text. This approach is compared with previous work and proved to yield higher accuracy for natural language analysis. An effective implementation strategy is also described, which is directly useful for natural language analysis. The book is noteworthy for demonstrating a new empirical approach to NLP; it is essential reading for researchers in natural language processing or computational linguistics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI-96, held in Montpellier, France, in September 1996.
The 25 revised full papers contained in the book together with two invited key papers by Magerman and Knuutila were carefully selected for presentation at the conference. The papers are organized in sections on algebraic methods and algorithms, natural language and pattern recognition, inference and stochastic models, incremental methods and inductive logic programming, and operational issues.

Crypto '96, the Sixteenth Annual Crypto Conference, is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), in cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and P- vacy and the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). It takes place at UCSB from August 18 to 22, 1996. The General Chair, Richard Graveman, is responsible for local organization and registration. The scientific program was organized by the 16-member Program C- mittee. We considered 115 papers. (An additional 15 submissions had to be summarily rejected because of lateness or major noncompliance with the c- ditions in the Call for Papers.) Of these, 30 were accepted for presentation. In addition, there will be five invited talks by Ernest Brickell. Andrew Clark, Whitfield Diffie, Ronald Rivest, and Cliff Stoll. A Rump Session will be chaired by Stuart Haber. These proceedings contain the revised versions of the 30 contributed talks. least three com- The submitted version of each paper was examined by at mittee members and/or outside experts, and their comments were taken into account in the revisions. However, the authors (and not the committee) bear full responsibility for the content of their papers.

This comprehensive state-of-the-art book is the first devoted to the important and timely issue of evaluating NLP systems. It addresses the whole area of NLP system evaluation, including aims and scope, problems and methodology.
The authors provide a wide-ranging and careful analysis of evaluation concepts, reinforced with extensive illustrations; they relate systems to their environments and develop a framework for proper evaluation. The discussion of principles is completed by a detailed review of practice and strategies in the field, covering both systems for specific tasks, like translation, and core language processors. The methodology lessons drawn from the analysis and review are applied in a series of example cases. A comprehensive bibliography, a subject index, and term glossary are included.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, AI 96, held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in May 1996.
The 35 revised full papers presented in the book were carefully selected by the program committee. Although organized by a national society, AI 96 attracted contributions and participants with a significant geographic diversity. The issues addressed in this volume cover an electic range of current AI topics with a certain emphasis on various aspects of knowledge representation, natural language processing, and learning.

This book is based on the workshop on New Approaches to Learning for Natural Language Processing, held in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI'95, in Montreal, Canada in August 1995.
Most of the 32 papers included in the book are revised selected workshop presentations; some papers were individually solicited from members of the workshop program committee to give the book an overall completeness. Also included, and written with the novice reader in mind, is a comprehensive introductory survey by the volume editors. The volume presents the state of the art in the most promising current approaches to learning for NLP and is thus compulsory reading for researchers in the field or for anyone applying the new techniques to challenging real-world NLP problems.

This volume includes revised final versions of the best papers presented at the fourth European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, EWNLG '93, held in Pisa, Italy in April 1993. Out of the 35 papers accepted for presentation at the workshop, 19 were selected for publication in this book.
The papers deal with NLG from different perspectives: linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychology, and engineering. The broad spectrum covered and the outstanding quality of the papers presented are evidence of the remarkable dynamism of the field.

Series Information:
Essays from the English Institute

Computational Psycholinguistics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Language investigates the architecture and mechanisms which underlie the human capacity to process language. It is the first such study to integrate modern syntactic theory, cross-linguistic psychological evidence, and modern computational techniques in constructing a model of the human sentence processing mechanism. The monograph follows the rationalist tradition, arguing the central role of modularity and universal grammar in a theory of human linguistic performance. It refines the notion of `modularity of mind', and presents a distributed model of syntactic processing which consists of modules aligned with the various informational `types' associated with modern linguistic theories. By considering psycholinguistic evidence from a range of languages, a small number of processing principles are motivated and are demonstrated to hold universally. It is also argued that the behavior of modules, and the strategies operative within them, can be derived from an overarching `Principle of Incremental Comprehension'. Audience: The book is recommended to all linguists, psycholinguists, computational linguists, and others interested in a unified and interdisciplinary study of the human language faculty.

This volume of papers grew out of a research project on "Cross-Linguistic Quantification" originated by Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer and Barbara Partee in 1987 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 871999. The publication also reflects directly or indirectly several other related activ ities. Bach, Kratzer, and Partee organized a two-evening symposium on cross-linguistic quantification at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Orleans (held without financial support) in order to bring the project to the attention of the linguistic community and solicit ideas and feedback from colleagues who might share our concern for developing a broader typological basis for research in semantics and a better integration of descriptive and theoretical work in the area of quantification in particular. The same trio organized a six-week workshop and open lecture series and related one-day confer ence on the same topic at the 1989 LSA Linguistic Institute at the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by a supplementary grant, NSF grant BNS-8811250, and Partee offered a seminar on the same topic as part of the Institute course offerings. Eloise Jelinek, who served as a consultant on the principal grant and was a participant in the LSA symposium and the Arizona workshops, joined the group of editors for this volume in 1989."

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Workshop of the European Association for Machine Translation, held in Heidelberg, Germany in April 1993. The EAMT Workshops traditionally aim at bringing together researchers, developers, users, and others interested in the field of machine or computer-assisted translation research, development and use.
The volume presents thoroughly revised versions of the 15 best workshop contributions together with an introductory survey by the volume editor. The presentations are centered primarily on questions of acquiring, sharing, and managing lexical data, but also address aspects of lexical description.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Second International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI-94), held in Alicante, Spain in September 1994.
Besides 25 research papers carefully selected and refereed by the program committee, the book contains a survey by E. Vidal. The book is devoted to all those aspects of automatic learning that explicitly focus on principles, theory, and applications of grammars and languages. The papers are organized in sections on formal aspects; language modelling and linguistic applications; stochastic approaches, applications and performance analysis; and neural networks, genetic algorithms, and artificial intelligence techniques.

From tech giants to plucky startups, the world is full of companies boasting that they are on their way to replacing human interpreters, but are they right? Interpreters vs Machines offers a solid introduction to recent theory and research on human and machine interpreting, and then invites the reader to explore the future of interpreting. With a foreword by Dr Henry Liu, the 13th International Federation of Translators (FIT) President, and written by consultant interpreter and researcher Jonathan Downie, this book offers a unique combination of research and practical insight into the field of interpreting. Written in an innovative, accessible style with humorous touches and real-life case studies, this book is structured around the metaphor of playing and winning a computer game. It takes interpreters of all experience levels on a journey to better understand their own work, learn how computers attempt to interpret and explore possible futures for human interpreters. With five levels and split into 14 chapters, Interpreters vs Machines is key reading for all professional interpreters as well as students and researchers of Interpreting and Translation Studies, and those with an interest in machine interpreting.

With this volume in honour of Don Walker, Linguistica Computazionale con tinues the series of special issues dedicated to outstanding personalities who have made a significant contribution to the progress of our discipline and maintained a special collaborative relationship with our Institute in Pisa. I take the liberty of quoting in this preface some of the initiatives Pisa and Don Walker have jointly promoted and developed during our collaboration, because I think that they might serve to illustrate some outstanding features of Don's personality, in particular his capacity for identifying areas of potential convergence among the different scientific communities within our field and establishing concrete forms of coop eration. These initiatives also testify to his continuous and untiring work, dedi cated to putting people into contact and opening up communication between them, collecting and disseminating information, knowledge and resources, and creating shareable basic infrastructures needed for progress in our field. Our collaboration began within the Linguistics in Documentation group of the FID and continued in the framework of the CCL (International Committee for Computational Linguistics). In 1982 this collaboration was strengthened when, at CO LING in Prague, I was invited by Don to join him in the organization of a series of workshops with participants of the various communities interested in the study, development, and use of computational lexica."

The Translator's Workbench Project was a European Community sponsored research and development project which dealt with issues in multi-lingual communication and docu mentation. This book presents an integrated toolset as a solution to problems in translation and docu mentation. Professional translators and teachers of translation were involved in the proc ess of software development, starting with a detailed study of the user requirements and ending with several evaluation-and-improvement cycles of the resulting toolset. English, German, Greek, and Spanish are addressed in the contributions, however, some of the techniques are inherently language-independent and can thus be extended to cover other languages as well. Translation can be viewed broadly as the execution of three cognitive processes, and this book has been structured along these lines: * First, the translation pre-process, understanding the target language text at a lexico semantic level on the one hand, and making sense of the source language document on the other hand. The tools for the pre-translation process include access to electronic networks, conversion of documents from one format to another, creation of terminol ogy data banks and access to existing data banks, and terminology dictionaries. * Second, the translation process, rendering sentences in the source language into equiva lent target sentences. The translation process refers to the potential of conventional machine translation systems, like METAL, and of the statistically oriented translation memory.

Der Kongress "Verarbeitung Naturlicher Sprache" (KONVENS) ist die erste Tagung, die gemeinsam von den folgenden wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften veranstaltet wird: GI (Gesellschaft fur Informa- tik e.V., Fachausschuss 1.3 "Naturliche Sprache"), DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Sprachwissen- schaft / Sektion Computerlinguistik), GLDV (Gesellschaft fur Linguistische Datenverarbeitung), ITG/DEGA (Informationstechnische Gesellschaft in Zusammenarbeit mit der Deutschen Gesell- schaft fur Akustik) und OGAI (Osterreichische Gesellschaft fur Artificial Intelligence). Sie soll die erste in einer Reihe von Tagungen uber die Verarbeitung naturlicher Sprache im deutschsprachigen Raum s~n, die die beteiligten Gesellschaften in zweijahrigem Turnus planen. Die Verantwortung fur die Organisation werden die veranstaltenden Gesellschaften reihum ubernehmen; bei der KONVENS 92 hat die Gesellschaft fur Informatik die Federfuhrung. Die KONVENS hat das Ziel, einen Querschnitt durch die aktuelle Forschung in allen Gebieten der Sprachverarbeitung zu bieten. Hierzu ist die Mitwirkung samtlicher fur die Sprachverarbeitung relevanten Disziplinen, wie z.B. Informatik, Linguistik, Psychologie und Nachrichtentechnik, erfor- derlich. In den Beitragen sollen neben grundlagen-orientierten Forschungsaspekten und Resultaten auch innovative Anwendungen vertreten sein. Besonders erwunscht sind Berichte uber erfolgreich durchgefuhrte und implementierte Vorhaben. Zusatzlich sollen durch die Vorgabe eines Schwerpunktthemas Anstosse in wichtigen Forschungsrich- tungen vermittelt werden. Als Schwerpunktthema fur die KONVENS 92 wurde "Integration akustischer und linguistischer Ansatze" gewahlt. Zum Schwerpunktthema werden drei eingeladene Vortrage angeboten sowie zwei Einfuh- rungskurse, die der Tagung vorangehen.