This book gathers high-quality papers presented at Academia-Industry Consortium for Data Science (AICDS 2020), held in Wenzhou, China during 19 - 20 December 2020. The book presents views of academicians and also how companies are approaching these challenges organizationally. The topics covered in the book are data science and analytics, natural language processing, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, big data computing, cognitive computing, data visualization, image processing, and optimization techniques.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design, CONVERSATIONS 2021, which was held during November 2021.Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online.The 12 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 25 submissions. The papers in the proceedings are structured in four topical groups: Chatbot User Insight, Chatbots Supporting Collaboration and Social Interaction, and Chatbot UX and Design.

Labelling data is one of the most fundamental activities in science, and has underpinned practice, particularly in medicine, for decades, as well as research in corpus linguistics since at least the development of the Brown corpus. With the shift towards Machine Learning in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the creation of datasets to be used for training and evaluating AI systems, also known in AI as corpora, has become a central activity in the field as well. Early AI datasets were created on an ad-hoc basis to tackle specific problems. As larger and more reusable datasets were created, requiring greater investment, the need for a more systematic approach to dataset creation arose to ensure increased quality. A range of statistical methods were adopted, often but not exclusively from the medical sciences, to ensure that the labels used were not subjective, or to choose among different labels provided by the coders. A wide variety of such methods is now in regular use. This book is meant to provide a survey of the most widely used among these statistical methods supporting annotation practice. As far as the authors know, this is the first book attempting to cover the two families of methods in wider use. The first family of methods is concerned with the development of labelling schemes and, in particular, ensuring that such schemes are such that sufficient agreement can be observed among the coders. The second family includes methods developed to analyze the output of coders once the scheme has been agreed upon, particularly although not exclusively to identify the most likely label for an item among those provided by the coders. The focus of this book is primarily on Natural Language Processing, the area of AI devoted to the development of models of language interpretation and production, but many if not most of the methods discussed here are also applicable to other areas of AI, or indeed, to other areas of Data Science.

This book constitutes selected revised papers of the 15th International Conference, NooJ 2021, held in Besancon, France, in June 2021. 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 62 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topics: linguistic formalization and analysis, digital humanities and teaching, natural language processing applications.

Leverage machine learning and deep learning techniques to build fully-fledged natural language processing (NLP) projects. Projects throughout this book grow in complexity and showcase methodologies, optimizing tips, and tricks to solve various business problems. You will use modern Python libraries and algorithms to build end-to-end NLP projects. The book starts with an overview of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence to provide a quick refresher on algorithms. Next, it covers end-to-end NLP projects beginning with traditional algorithms and projects such as customer review sentiment and emotion detection, topic modeling, and document clustering. From there, it delves into e-commerce related projects such as product categorization using the description of the product, a search engine to retrieve the relevant content, and a content-based recommendation system to enhance user experience. Moving forward, it explains how to build systems to find similar sentences using contextual embedding, summarizing huge documents using recurrent neural networks (RNN), automatic word suggestion using long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and how to build a chatbot using transfer learning. It concludes with an exploration of next-generation AI and algorithms in the research space. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge needed to solve various business problems using NLP techniques. What You Will Learn Implement full-fledged intelligent NLP applications with Python Translate real-world business problem on text data with NLP techniques Leverage machine learning and deep learning techniques to perform smart language processing Gain hands-on experience implementing end-to-end search engine information retrieval, text summarization, chatbots, text generation, document clustering and product classification, and more Who This Book Is For Data scientists, machine learning engineers, and deep learning professionals looking to build natural language applications using Python

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Data and Social Networks, CSoNet 2021, which was held online during November 15-17, 2021. The conference was initially planned to take place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but changed to an online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 24 full and 8 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Combinatorial optimization and learning; deep learning and applications to complex and social systems; measurements of insight from data; complex networks analytics; special track on fact-checking, fake news and malware detection in online social networks; and special track on information spread in social and data networks.

Empirical methods are means to answering methodological questions of empirical sciences by statistical techniques. The methodological questions addressed in this book include the problems of validity, reliability, and significance. In the case of machine learning, these correspond to the questions of whether a model predicts what it purports to predict, whether a model's performance is consistent across replications, and whether a performance difference between two models is due to chance, respectively. The goal of this book is to answer these questions by concrete statistical tests that can be applied to assess validity, reliability, and significance of data annotation and machine learning prediction in the fields of NLP and data science. Our focus is on model-based empirical methods where data annotations and model predictions are treated as training data for interpretable probabilistic models from the well-understood families of generalized additive models (GAMs) and linear mixed effects models (LMEMs). Based on the interpretable parameters of the trained GAMs or LMEMs, the book presents model-based statistical tests such as a validity test that allows detecting circular features that circumvent learning. Furthermore, the book discusses a reliability coefficient using variance decomposition based on random effect parameters of LMEMs. Last, a significance test based on the likelihood ratio of nested LMEMs trained on the performance scores of two machine learning models is shown to naturally allow the inclusion of variations in meta-parameter settings into hypothesis testing, and further facilitates a refined system comparison conditional on properties of input data. This book can be used as an introduction to empirical methods for machine learning in general, with a special focus on applications in NLP and data science. The book is self-contained, with an appendix on the mathematical background on GAMs and LMEMs, and with an accompanying webpage including R code to replicate experiments presented in the book.

This book, with a foreword by Manuel Castells, explores the core strategies of digital political communication. It reviews the field's evolution over the past 25 years and examines the coexistence of old and new actors (lobbyists, citizens, parliaments, political parties, media outlets, digital platforms, among others), as well as hybrid communication tactics. Topics covered include frames, fake news, filter bubbles, echo chambers, artificial intelligence, the significance of emotions, and engagement with citizens.As we find ourselves in the fourth wave of digital communication, and in the wake of a pandemic which has shaken the foundations of political communication, an evaluation of these topics is essential to the reinvention of democracy. The book is geared towards students and researchers who wish to delve into the latest trends in digital communication, political communication actors and journalists. It further aims to prepare citizens to effectively deal with messaging that blurs the line between truth and falsehood with increasingly powerful strategies supported by artificial intelligence.

This book discusses the state of the art of automated essay scoring, its challenges and its potential. One of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence to language data (along with machine translation and speech recognition), automated essay scoring has evolved to become both a revenue-generating industry and a vast field of research, with many subfields and connections to other NLP tasks. In this book, we review the developments in this field against the backdrop of Elias Page's seminal 1966 paper titled "The Imminence of Grading Essays by Computer." Part 1 establishes what automated essay scoring is about, why it exists, where the technology stands, and what are some of the main issues. In Part 2, the book presents guided exercises to illustrate how one would go about building and evaluating a simple automated scoring system, while Part 3 offers readers a survey of the literature on different types of scoring models, the aspects of essay quality studied in prior research, and the implementation and evaluation of a scoring engine. Part 4 offers a broader view of the field inclusive of some neighboring areas, and Part \ref{part5} closes with summary and discussion. This book grew out of a week-long course on automated evaluation of language production at the North American Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), attended by advanced undergraduates and early-stage graduate students from a variety of disciplines. Teachers of natural language processing, in particular, will find that the book offers a useful foundation for a supplemental module on automated scoring. Professionals and students in linguistics, applied linguistics, educational technology, and other related disciplines will also find the material here useful.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2020, held in Xining, China, in October 2021. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions and focus on all aspects of machine translation, including preprocessing, neural machine translation models, hybrid model, evaluation method, and post-editing.

The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing (NLP) applications.This book provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has been responsible for a paradigm shift in NLP, information retrieval (IR), and beyond. This book provides a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area. It covers a wide range of modern techniques, grouped into two high-level categories: transformer models that perform reranking in multi-stage architectures and dense retrieval techniques that perform ranking directly. Two themes pervade the book: techniques for handling long documents, beyond typical sentence-by-sentence processing in NLP, and techniques for addressing the tradeoff between effectiveness (i.e., result quality) and efficiency (e.g., query latency, model and index size). Although transformer architectures and pretraining techniques are recent innovations, many aspects of how they are applied to text ranking are relatively well understood and represent mature techniques. However, there remain many open research questions, and thus in addition to laying out the foundations of pretrained transformers for text ranking, this book also attempts to prognosticate where the field is heading.

This two-volume set of LNAI 13028 and LNAI 13029 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2021, held in Qingdao, China, in October 2021.The 66 full papers, 23 poster papers, and 27 workshop papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 446 submissions. They are organized in the following areas: Fundamentals of NLP; Machine Translation and Multilinguality; Machine Learning for NLP; Information Extraction and Knowledge Graph; Summarization and Generation; Question Answering; Dialogue Systems; Social Media and Sentiment Analysis; NLP Applications and Text Mining; and Multimodality and Explainability.

This two-volume set of LNAI 13028 and LNAI 13029 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2021, held in Qingdao, China, in October 2021.The 66 full papers, 23 poster papers, and 27 workshop papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 446 submissions. They are organized in the following areas: Fundamentals of NLP; Machine Translation and Multilinguality; Machine Learning for NLP; Information Extraction and Knowledge Graph; Summarization and Generation; Question Answering; Dialogue Systems; Social Media and Sentiment Analysis; NLP Applications and Text Mining; and Multimodality and Explainability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th China Conference on Information Retrieval, CCIR 2021, held in Dalian, China, in October 2021.The 15 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 124 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: search and recommendation, NLP for IR, IR in Education, and IR in Biomedicine.

The book presents current research and developments in multilingual speech recognition. The author presents a Multilingual Phone Recognition System (Multi-PRS), developed using a common multilingual phone-set derived from the International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA) based transcription of six Indian languages - Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Odia, Urdu, and Assamese. The author shows how the performance of Multi-PRS can be improved using tandem features. The book compares Monolingual Phone Recognition Systems (Mono-PRS) versus Multi-PRS and baseline versus tandem system. Methods are proposed to predict Articulatory Features (AFs) from spectral features using Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Multitask learning is explored to improve the prediction accuracy of AFs. Then, the AFs are explored to improve the performance of Multi-PRS using lattice rescoring method of combination and tandem method of combination. The author goes on to develop and evaluate the Language Identification followed by Monolingual phone recognition (LID-Mono) and common multilingual phone-set based multilingual phone recognition systems.

This book presents a taxonomy framework and survey of methods relevant to explaining the decisions and analyzing the inner workings of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. The book is intended to provide a snapshot of Explainable NLP, though the field continues to rapidly grow. The book is intended to be both readable by first-year M.Sc. students and interesting to an expert audience. The book opens by motivating a focus on providing a consistent taxonomy, pointing out inconsistencies and redundancies in previous taxonomies. It goes on to present (i) a taxonomy or framework for thinking about how approaches to explainable NLP relate to one another; (ii) brief surveys of each of the classes in the taxonomy, with a focus on methods that are relevant for NLP; and (iii) a discussion of the inherent limitations of some classes of methods, as well as how to best evaluate them. Finally, the book closes by providing a list of resources for further research on explainability.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the international workshops co-located with the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in September 2021.The total of 59 full and 12 short papers presented in this book were carefully selected from 96 contributions and divided into two volumes. Part I contains 29 full and 4 short papers that stem from the following meetings: ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC); ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR); ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Arabic and Derived Script Analysis and Recognition (ASAR 2021); ICDAR 2021 Workshop on Computational Document Forensics (IWCDF). The main topics of the contributions are document processing; physical and logical layout analysis; text and symbol recognition; handwriting recognition; signature verification and document forensics, and others. "Accurate Graphic Symbol Detection in Ancient Document Digital Reproductions" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the international workshops co-located with the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in September 2021.The total of 59 full and 12 short papers presented in this book were carefully selected from 96 submissions and divided into two volumes. Part II contains 30 full and 8 short papers that stem from the following meetings: Workshop on Machine Learning (WML); Workshop on Open Services and Tools for Document Analysis (OST); Workshop on Industrial Applications of Document Analysis and Recognition (WIADAR); Workshop on Computational Paleography (IWCP); Workshop on Document Images and Language (DIL); Workshop on Graph Representation Learning for Scanned Document Analysis (GLESDO).

This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports. The papers are organized into the following topical sections: document analysis for literature search, document summarization and translation, multimedia document analysis, mobile text recognition, document analysis for social good, indexing and retrieval of documents, physical and logical layout analysis, recognition of tables and formulas, and natural language processing (NLP) for document understanding.

This four-volume set of LNCS 12821, LNCS 12822, LNCS 12823 and LNCS 12824, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2021, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2021. The 182 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 340 submissions, and are presented with 13 competition reports. The papers are organized into the following topical sections: historical document analysis, document analysis systems, handwriting recognition, scene text detection and recognition, document image processing, natural language processing (NLP) for document understanding, and graphics, diagram and math recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2021, held virtually in September 2021.The conference has a clear focus on experimental information retrieval with special attention to the challenges of multimodality, multilinguality, and interactive search ranging from unstructured to semi structures and structured data. The 11 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. This year, the contributions addressed the following challenges: application of neural methods for entity recognition as well as misinformation detection in the health area, skills extraction in job-match databases, stock market prediction using financial news, and extraction of audio features for podcast retrieval. In addition to this, the volume presents 5 "best of the labs" papers which were reviewed as full paper submissions with the same review criteria. 12 lab overview papers were accepted and represent scientific challenges based on new data sets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Combinatorics on Words, WORDS 2021, held virtually in September 2021. The 14 revised full papers presented in this book together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. WORDS is the main conference series devoted to the mathematical theory of words. In particular, the combinatorial, algebraic and algorithmic aspects of words are emphasized. Motivations may also come from other domains such as theoretical computer science, bioinformatics, digital geometry, symbolic dynamics, numeration systems, text processing, number theory, etc.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCL 2021, held in Hohhot, China, in August 2021.The 31 full presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The conference papers covers the following topics such as Machine Translation and Multilingual Information Processing, Minority Language Information Processing, Social Computing and Sentiment Analysis, Text Generation and Summarization, Information Retrieval, Dialogue and Question Answering, Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Language Resource and Evaluation, Knowledge Graph and Information Extraction, and NLP Applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 21st Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2020, held in Hong Kong, China in May 2020.Due to COVID-19, the conference was held virtually. The 76 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 233 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical semantics and general linguistics, AI, Big Data, and NLP, Cognitive Science and experimental studies.

The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.