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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

This book constitutes the post-conference proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Analytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains, DAMDID/RCDL 2020, held in Voronezh, Russia, in October 2020*.The 16 revised full papers and two keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: data Integration, conceptual models and ontologies; data management in semantic web; data analysis in medicine; data analysis in astronomy; information extraction from text. * The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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 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 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.