This book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2021, which was held in Porto, Portugal, during August 16-20, 2021. The conference took place in an hybrid format with both in-person and online participation.The 27 full papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The DLT conference series provides a forum for presenting current developments in formal languages and automata. Its scope is very general and includes, among others, the following topics and areas: grammars, acceptors and transducers for words, trees and graphs; algebraic theories of automata; algorithmic, combinatorial, and algebraic properties of words and languages; variable length codes; symbolic dynamics; cellular automata; polyominoes and multidimensional patterns; decidability questions; image manipulation and compression; efficient text algorithms; relationships to cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory, and logic; bio-inspired computing; quantum computing. The book also includes 3 invited talks in full paper length.

This book provides readers with a practical guide to the principles of hybrid approaches to natural language processing (NLP) involving a combination of neural methods and knowledge graphs. To this end, it first introduces the main building blocks and then describes how they can be integrated to support the effective implementation of real-world NLP applications. To illustrate the ideas described, the book also includes a comprehensive set of experiments and exercises involving different algorithms over a selection of domains and corpora in various NLP tasks. Throughout, the authors show how to leverage complementary representations stemming from the analysis of unstructured text corpora as well as the entities and relations described explicitly in a knowledge graph, how to integrate such representations, and how to use the resulting features to effectively solve NLP tasks in a range of domains. In addition, the book offers access to executable code with examples, exercises and real-world applications in key domains, like disinformation analysis and machine reading comprehension of scientific literature. All the examples and exercises proposed in the book are available as executable Jupyter notebooks in a GitHub repository. They are all ready to be run on Google Colaboratory or, if preferred, in a local environment. A valuable resource for anyone interested in the interplay between neural and knowledge-based approaches to NLP, this book is a useful guide for readers with a background in structured knowledge representations as well as those whose main approach to AI is fundamentally based on logic. Further, it will appeal to those whose main background is in the areas of machine and deep learning who are looking for ways to leverage structured knowledge bases to optimize results along the NLP downstream.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Reversible Computation, RC 2021, which was held online during July 7-8, 2021. The 11 papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The book also contains 2 invited talks in full-paper length, 3 work-in-progress papers and 1 tool paper. They were organized in topical sections named: programming and programming languages; reversible concurrent computation; theory and foundations; and circuit synthesis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2021, held online in July 2021. The 19 full papers and 14 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: role of learning; methodological approaches; semantic relations; classification; sentiment analysis; social media; linking documents; multimodality; applications.

This book is a part of the Blue Book series "Research on the Development of Electronic Information Engineering Technology in China", which explores the cutting edge of natural language processing (NLP) studies. The research objects of natural language processing are evolved from words, phrases, and sentences to text, and research directions are from language analysis, language understanding, language generation, knowledge graphs, machine translation, to deep semantic understanding, and beyond. This is in line with the development trend of applications. And for another typical NLP application machine translation, from text translation, to voice and image translation, now simultaneous interpretation, progress of technology makes the application of machine translation deeper and wider into diverse industries. This book is intended for researchers and industrial staffs who have been following the current situation and future trends of the natural language processing. Meanwhile, it also bears high value of reference for experts, scholars, and technical and engineering managers of different levels and different fields.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference on Coordination Models and Language, COORDINATION 2021, held in Valletta, Malta, in June 2021, as part of the 16th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2021.The 15 regular papers, 2 short papers, and 1 tutorial paper presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. COORDINATION provides a well-established forum for the growing community of researchers interested in coordination models and languages, architectures, verification and implementation techniques necessary to cope with the complexity induced by the demands of today's software development. The tool papers describe experience reports, technological artefacts, and innovative prototypes, as well as educational tools in the scope of the research topics of the conference. Due to the Corona pandemic this event was held virtually.

This Festschrift is in honor of Chris Hankin, Professor at the Imperial College in London, UK, on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday.Chris Hankin is a Fellow of the Institute for Security Science and Technology and a Professor of Computing Science. His research is in cyber security, data analytics and semantics-based program analysis. He leads multidisciplinary projects focused on developing advanced visual analytics and providing better decision support to defend against cyber attacks. This Festschrift is a collection of scientific contributions related to the topics that have marked the research career of Professor Chris Hankin. The contributions have been written to honour Chris' career and on the occasion of his retirement.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Confederated International International Workshop on Enterprise Integration, Interoperability and Networking (EI2N ), Fact Based Modeling ( FBM), Industry Case Studies Program ( ICSP ), International Workshop on Methods, Evaluation, Tools and Applications for the Creation and Consumption of Structured Data for the e-Society (Meta4eS) and, 1st International Workshop on Security via Information Analytics and Applications (SIAnA 2019) held as part of OTM 2018 in October 2019 in Rhodes, Greece. As the three main conferences and the associated workshops all share the distributed aspects of modern computing systems, they experience the application pull created by the Internet and by the so-called Semantic Web, in particular developments of Big Data, increased importance of security issues, and the globalization of mobile-based technologies.

Opinion mining is a prevalent research issue in many domains. In the financial domain, however, it is still in the early stages. Most of the researches on this topic only focus on the coarse-grained market sentiment analysis, i.e., 2-way classification for bullish/bearish. Thanks to the recent financial technology (FinTech) development, some interdisciplinary researchers start to involve in the in-depth analysis of investors' opinions. These works indicate the trend toward fine-grained opinion mining in the financial domain. When expressing opinions in finance, terms like bullish/bearish often spring to mind. However, the market sentiment of the financial instrument is just one type of opinion in the financial industry. Like other industries such as manufacturing and textiles, the financial industry also has a large number of products. Financial services are also a major business for many financial companies, especially in the context of the recent FinTech trend. For instance, many commercial banks focus on loans and credit cards. Although there are a variety of issues that could be explored in the financial domain, most researchers in the AI and NLP communities only focus on the market sentiment of the stock or foreign exchange. This open access book addresses several research issues that can broaden the research topics in the AI community. It also provides an overview of the status quo in fine-grained financial opinion mining to offer insights into the futures goals. For a better understanding of the past and the current research, it also discusses the components of financial opinions one-by-one with the related works and highlights some possible research avenues, providing a research agenda with both micro- and macro-views toward financial opinions.

Weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) are commonly used by engineers and computational linguists for processing and generating speech and text. This book first provides a detailed introduction to this formalism. It then introduces Pynini, a Python library for compiling finite-state grammars and for combining, optimizing, applying, and searching finite-state transducers. This book illustrates this library's conventions and use with a series of case studies. These include the compilation and application of context-dependent rewrite rules, the construction of morphological analyzers and generators, and text generation and processing applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design, CONVERSATIONS 2019, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2019. The 18 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers are grouped in the following topical sections: user and communication studies user experience and design, chatbots for collaboration, chatbots for customer service, and chatbots in education.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference, NooJ 2019, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2019. NooJ is a linguistic development environment that allows linguists to formalize several levels of linguistic phenomena. NooJ provides linguists with tools to develop dictionaries, regular grammars, context-free grammars, context-sensitive grammars and unrestricted grammars as well as their graphical equivalent to formalize each linguistic phenomenon. The 18 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in the following tracks: Development of Linguistic Resources, Natural Language Processing Applications, NooJ for the Digital Humanities.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis, IDA 2021, which was planned to take place in Porto, Portugal. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online during April 26-28, 2021.The 35 papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 113 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: modeling with neural networks; modeling with statistical learning; modeling language and graphs; and modeling special data formats.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 9th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2020, held during October 15-16, 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Moscow, Russia, but changed to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 27 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 108 qualified submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: invited papers; natural language processing; computer vision; social network analysis; data analysis and machine learning; theoretical machine learning and optimization; and process mining.

Opportunity and Curiosity find similar rocks on Mars. One can generally understand this statement if one knows that Opportunity and Curiosity are instances of the class of Mars rovers, and recognizes that, as signalled by the word on, rocks are located on Mars. Two mental operations contribute to understanding: recognize how entities/concepts mentioned in a text interact and recall already known facts (which often themselves consist of relations between entities/concepts). Concept interactions one identifies in the text can be added to the repository of known facts, and aid the processing of future texts. The amassed knowledge can assist many advanced language-processing tasks, including summarization, question answering and machine translation. Semantic relations are the connections we perceive between things which interact. The book explores two, now intertwined, threads in semantic relations: how they are expressed in texts and what role they play in knowledge repositories. A historical perspective takes us back more than 2000 years to their beginnings, and then to developments much closer to our time: various attempts at producing lists of semantic relations, necessary and sufficient to express the interaction between entities/concepts. A look at relations outside context, then in general texts, and then in texts in specialized domains, has gradually brought new insights, and led to essential adjustments in how the relations are seen. At the same time, datasets which encompass these phenomena have become available. They started small, then grew somewhat, then became truly large. The large resources are inevitably noisy because they are constructed automatically. The available corpora-to be analyzed, or used to gather relational evidence-have also grown, and some systems now operate at the Web scale. The learning of semantic relations has proceeded in parallel, in adherence to supervised, unsupervised or distantly supervised paradigms. Detailed analyses of annotated datasets in supervised learning have granted insights useful in developing unsupervised and distantly supervised methods. These in turn have contributed to the understanding of what relations are and how to find them, and that has led to methods scalable to Web-sized textual data. The size and redundancy of information in very large corpora, which at first seemed problematic, have been harnessed to improve the process of relation extraction/learning. The newest technology, deep learning, supplies innovative and surprising solutions to a variety of problems in relation learning. This book aims to paint a big picture and to offer interesting details.

This two-volume set LNCS 12656 and 12657 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 43rd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2021, held virtually in March/April 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 50 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 39 short papers, 15 demonstration papers, 12 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 5 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 8 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 436 submissions. The accepted contributions cover the state of the art in IR: deep learning-based information retrieval techniques, use of entities and knowledge graphs, recommender systems, retrieval methods, information extraction, question answering, topic and prediction models, multimedia retrieval, and much more.

This two-volume set LNCS 12656 and 12657 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 43rd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2021, held virtually in March/April 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 50 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 39 short papers, 15 demonstration papers, 12 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 5 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 8 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 436 submissions. The accepted contributions cover the state of the art in IR: deep learning-based information retrieval techniques, use of entities and knowledge graphs, recommender systems, retrieval methods, information extraction, question answering, topic and prediction models, multimedia retrieval, and much more.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2021, which took place during March 27-April 1, 2021, and was held as part of the Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Luxembourg but changed to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 16 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The book also contains 4 Test-Comp contributions.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures, FOSSACS 2021, which was held during March 27 until April 1, 2021, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Luxembourg and changed to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 28 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. They deal with research on theories and methods to support the analysis, integration, synthesis, transformation, and verification of programs and software systems.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 30th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2021, which was held during March 27 until April 1, 2021, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Luxembourg and changed to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 24 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. They deal with fundamental issues in the specification, design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research, MTSR 2019, held in Rome, Italy, in October 2019. The 27 full and 15 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in the following tracks: metadata and semantics for digital libraries, information retrieval, big, linked, social and open data; metadata and semantics for agriculture, food, and environment; digital humanities and digital curation; cultural collections and applications; european and national projects; metadata, identifiers and semantics in decentralized applications, blockchains and P2P systems.

This book constitutes selected revised papers of the 14th International Conference, NooJ 2020, held Zagreb, Croatia, in June 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. NooJ is a linguistic development environment that allows linguists to formalize several levels of linguistic phenomena. NooJ provides linguists with tools to develop dictionaries, regular grammars, context-free grammars, context-sensitive grammars and unrestricted grammars as well as their graphical equivalent to formalize each linguistic phenomenon. The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topics: Linguistic Formalization; Digital Humanities and Teaching with NooJ; Natural Language Processing Applications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2021, held in Milan, Italy, in March 2021. The 26 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: algebraic structures; automata; complexity; learning; logics and languages; trees and graphs; and words and strings.

The two-volume set LNCS 12615 + 12616 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction, IHCI 2020, which took place in Daegu, South Korea, during November 24-26, 2020.The 75 full and 18 short papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 185 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: cognitive modeling and system; biomedical signal processing and complex problem solving; natural language, speech, voice and study; algorithm and related applications; crowd sourcing and information analysis; intelligent usability and test system; assistive living; image processing and deep learning; and human-centered AI applications.