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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 22nd International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation, VMCAI 2021, which was held virtually during January 17-19, 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, but changed to an online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 23 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed from 48 submissions. VMCAI provides a forum for researchers working on verification, model checking, and abstract interpretation and facilitates interaction, cross-fertilization, and advancement of hybrid methods that combine these and related areas. The papers presented in this volume were organized in the following topical sections: hyperproperties and infinite-state systems; concurrent and distributed systems; checking; synthesis and repair; applications; and decision procedures.

The 6-volume set, comprising the LNCS books 12535 until 12540, constitutes the refereed proceedings of 28 out of the 45 workshops held at the 16th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Glasgow, UK, during August 23-28, 2020, but changed to a virtual format due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 249 full papers, 18 short papers, and 21 further contributions included in the workshop proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 467 submissions. The papers deal with diverse computer vision topics. Part II focusses on commands for autonomous vehicles; computer vision for ART analysis; sign language recognition, translation and production; visual inductive priors for data-efficient deep learning; 3D poses in the wild challenge; map-based localization for autonomous driving; recovering 6D object pose; and shape recovery from partial textured 3D scans.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2020, which took place in Lodz, Poland, during December 2-4, 2020. The 24 full and 3 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: theory and cryptography, modeling and simulation, and disease spreading dynamics.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Big Data Analytics, BDA 2020, which took place during December 15-18, 2020, in Sonepat, India. The 11 full and 3 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions; the book also contains 4 invited and 3 tutorial papers. The contributions were organized in topical sections named as follows: data science systems; data science architectures; big data analytics in healthcare; information interchange of Web data resources; and business analytics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2017, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2017. The 26 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Language Resources, Tools and Evaluation, Less-Resourced-Languages, Speech Processing, Morphology, Computational Semantics, Machine Translation, and Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.

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.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, ICFEM 2020, held in Singapore, Singapore, in March 2021. The 16 full and 4 short papers presented together with 1 doctoral symposium paper in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers cover theory and applications in formal engineering methods together with case studies. They also represent the recent development in the use and development of formal engineering methods for software and system development.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2020, which took place during November 30-December 4, 2020. The conference was originally planned to take place in Macau, China, but changed to a virtual only format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 15 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The book also contains one invited talk in full paper length. The book deals with challenges in both theoretical aspects of computing and the exploitation of theory through methods and tools for system development.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCL 2020, held in Hainan, China, in October/November 2020.The 32 full and 2 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: fundamental theory and methods of computational linguistics; information retrieval, dialogue and question answering; text generation and summarization; knowledge graph and information extraction; machine translation and multilingual information processing; minority language information processing; language resource and evaluation; social computing and sentiment analysis; and NLP applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2020, held in Hohhot, China, in October 2020. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions and focus on all aspects of machine translation, including preprocessing, neural machine translation models, hybrid model, evaluation method, and post-editing.

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 volume contains 8 lecture notes of the 16th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2020), held in Oslo, Norway, in June 2020. The Reasoning Web series of annual summer schools has become the prime educational event in the field of reasoning techniques on the Web, attracting both young and established researchers. The broad theme of this year's summer school was "Declarative Artificial Intelligence" and it covered various aspects of ontological reasoning and related issues that are of particular interest to Semantic Web and Linked Data applications. The following eight lectures have been presented during the school: Introduction to Probabilistic Ontologies, On the Complexity of Learning Description Logic Ontologies, Explanation via Machine Arguing, Stream Reasoning: From Theory to Practice, First-Order Rewritability of Temporal Ontology-Mediated Queries, An Introduction to Answer Set Programming and Some of Its Extensions, Declarative Data Analysis using Limit Datalog Programs, and Knowledge Graphs: Research Directions.

Work with natural language tools and techniques to solve real-world problems. This book focuses on how natural language processing (NLP) is used in various industries. Each chapter describes the problem and solution strategy, then provides an intuitive explanation of how different algorithms work and a deeper dive on code and output in Python. Practical Natural Language Processing with Python follows a case study-based approach. Each chapter is devoted to an industry or a use case, where you address the real business problems in that industry and the various ways to solve them. You start with various types of text data before focusing on the customer service industry, the type of data available in that domain, and the common NLP problems encountered. Here you cover the bag-of-words model supervised learning technique as you try to solve the case studies. Similar depth is given to other use cases such as online reviews, bots, finance, and so on. As you cover the problems in these industries you'll also cover sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, word2vec, word similarities, topic modeling, deep learning, and sequence to sequence modelling. By the end of the book, you will be able to handle all types of NLP problems independently. You will also be able to think in different ways to solve language problems. Code and techniques for all the problems are provided in the book. What You Will Learn Build an understanding of NLP problems in industry Gain the know-how to solve a typical NLP problem using language-based models and machine learning Discover the best methods to solve a business problem using NLP - the tried and tested ones Understand the business problems that are tough to solve Who This Book Is For Analytics and data science professionals who want to kick start NLP, and NLP professionals who want to get new ideas to solve the problems at hand.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2020, which was planned to be held in Kyoto, Japan, in November/December 2020, but it was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 10 full, 15 short, 4 practitioners, and 10 work-in-progress papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: natural language processing; knowledge structures; citation data analysis; user analytics; application of cultural and historical data; social media; metadata and infrastructure; and scholarly data mining.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling, SBP-BRiMS 2020, which was planned to take place in Washington, DC, USA. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online during October 18-21, 2020. The 33 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. A wide number of disciplines are represented including computer science, psychology, sociology, communication science, public health, bioinformatics, political science, and organizational science. Numerous types of computational methods are used, such as machine learning, language technology, social network analysis and visualization, agent-based simulation, and statistics.

Embeddings have undoubtedly been one of the most influential research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Encoding information into a low-dimensional vector representation, which is easily integrable in modern machine learning models, has played a central role in the development of NLP. Embedding techniques initially focused on words, but the attention soon started to shift to other forms: from graph structures, such as knowledge bases, to other types of textual content, such as sentences and documents. This book provides a high-level synthesis of the main embedding techniques in NLP, in the broad sense. The book starts by explaining conventional word vector space models and word embeddings (e.g., Word2Vec and GloVe) and then moves to other types of embeddings, such as word sense, sentence and document, and graph embeddings. The book also provides an overview of recent developments in contextualized representations (e.g., ELMo and BERT) and explains their potential in NLP. Throughout the book, the reader can find both essential information for understanding a certain topic from scratch and a broad overview of the most successful techniques developed in the literature.

The LNCS 12115 constitutes the workshop papers which were held also online in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications in September 2020. The complete conference includes 119 full papers presented together with 19 short papers plus 15 demo papers and 4 industrial papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 487 submissions. DASFAA 2020 presents this year following five workshops: The 7th International Workshop on Big Data Management and Service (BDMS 2020) The 6th International Symposium on Semantic Computing and Personalization (SeCoP 2020) The 5th Big Data Quality Management (BDQM 2020) The 4th International Workshop on Graph Data Management and Analysis (GDMA 2020) The 1st International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Data Engineering (AIDE 2020)

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th Russian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, RCAI 2020, held in Moscow, Russia, in October 2020. The 27 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. The conference deals with a wide range of topics, including data mining and knowledge discovery, text mining, reasoning, decisionmaking, natural language processing, vision, intelligent robotics, multi-agent systems,machine learning, AI in applied systems, and ontology engineering.