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 thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th Joint International Semantic Technology Conference, JIST 2019, held in Hangzhou, China, in November 2019.The 12 full papers and 12 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers present applications of semantic technologies, theoretical results, new algorithms and tools to facilitate the adoption of semantic technologies.

This book provides the readers with retrospective and prospective views with detailed explanations of component technologies, speech recognition, language translation and speech synthesis. Speech-to-speech translation system (S2S) enables to break language barriers, i.e., communicate each other between any pair of person on the glove, which is one of extreme dreams of humankind. People, society, and economy connected by S2S will demonstrate explosive growth without exception. In 1986, Japan initiated basic research of S2S, then the idea spread world-wide and were explored deeply by researchers during three decades. Now, we see S2S application on smartphone/tablet around the world. Computational resources such as processors, memories, wireless communication accelerate this computation-intensive systems and accumulation of digital data of speech and language encourage recent approaches based on machine learning. Through field experiments after long research in laboratories, S2S systems are being well-developed and now ready to utilized in daily life. Unique chapter of this book is end-2-end evaluation by comparing system's performance and human competence. The effectiveness of the system would be understood by the score of this evaluation. The book will end with one of the next focus of S2S will be technology of simultaneous interpretation for lecture, broadcast news and so on.

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 the refereed proceedings of the 15th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2019, held in Nanchang, China, in September 2019. The 10 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 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 13th International Conference on Mathematics of Program Construction, MPC 2019, held in Porto, Portugal, in October 2019. The 15 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers deal with mathematical principles and techniques for constructing computer programs. They range from algorithmics to support for program construction in programming languages and systems. Some typical areas are type systems, program analysis and transformation, programming-language semantics, security, and program logics.

This volume LNCS 11877 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Confederated International Conferences: Cooperative Information Systems, CoopIS 2019, Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics, ODBASE 2019, and Cloud and Trusted Computing, C&TC, held as part of OTM 2019 in October 2019 in Rhodes, Greece. The 38 full papers presented together with 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 156 submissions. The OTM program every year covers data and Web semantics, distributed objects, Web services, databases, informationsystems, enterprise workflow and collaboration, ubiquity, interoperability, mobility, grid and high-performance computing.

Meaning is a fundamental concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP), in the tasks of both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). This is because the aims of these fields are to build systems that understand what people mean when they speak or write, and that can produce linguistic strings that successfully express to people the intended content. In order for NLP to scale beyond partial, task-specific solutions, researchers in these fields must be informed by what is known about how humans use language to express and understand communicative intents. The purpose of this book is to present a selection of useful information about semantics and pragmatics, as understood in linguistics, in a way that's accessible to and useful for NLP practitioners with minimal (or even no) prior training in linguistics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th China Conference on Information Retrieval, CCIR 2019, held in Fuzhou, China, in September 2019. The 13 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. Academic research is aimed at the precise acquisition of information and knowledge by human beings. The research results will support national strategic decision-making, promote the development of the Internet and IT fields, enhance the production efficiency of the industry, and have a major impact on various fields of social life.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCL 2019, held in Kunming, China, in October 2019. The 56 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: linguistics and cognitive science, fundamental theory and methods of computational linguistics, information retrieval and question answering, text classification and summarization, knowledge graph and information extraction, machine translation and multilingual information processing, minority language processing, language resource and evaluation, social computing and sentiment analysis, NLP applications.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 7th International Conference on Arabic Language Processing, ICALP 2019, held in Nancy, France, in October 2019. The 21 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Arabic dialects and sentiment analysis; neural techniques for text and speech; modeling modern standard Arabic; resources: analysis, disambiguation and evaluation.

The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in different sites around Europe. The papers cover vastly dierent topics, but each fall in the intersection of the three primary topics of ESSLLI: Logic, Language and Computation. The 14 papers presented in this volume have been selected among 24 papers presented by talks or posters at the Student Sessions of the 30th edition of ESSLLI, held in 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria.The Student Session is a forum for PhD and Master students to present their research at the interfaces of logic, language and computation. It features three tracks: Logic and Computation (LoCo), Logic and Language (LoLa), and Language and Computation (LaCo).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2019, held in Lugano, Switzerland, in September 2019.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 7 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. This year, many contributions tackle the social networks with the detection of stances or early identification of depression signs on Twitter in a cross-lingual context. Further this volume presents 7 "best of the labs" papers which were reviewed as a full paper submission with the same review criteria. The labs represented scientific challenges based on new data sets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access. In addition to this, 9 benchmarking labs reported results of their yearlong activities in overview talks and lab sessions.

Das Buch ist interdisziplinar zwischen Kunstlicher Intelligenz, Linguistik und Kognitionswissenschaften angesiedelt. Es gibt eine umfassende Darstellung der semantischen Interpretation und Bedeutungsdarstellung naturlichsprachlicher Ausdrucke auf der Basis Mehrschichtiger Erweiterter Semantischer Netze" (MultiNet). Die damit verbundene Methodik ist sowohl fur theoretische Untersuchungen als auch fur die automatische Sprachverarbeitung geeignet. Die vorgestellten Ergebnisse sind eingebettet in ein System von Software-Werkzeugen, die eine praktische Nutzung des MultiNet-Paradigmas zur Wissensreprasentation sichern. Hierzu gehoren: eine Werkbank fur den Wissensingenieur, ein Ubersetzungssystem zur automatischen Erzeugung von Bedeutungsdarstellungen naturlichsprachlicher Satze und eine Werkbank fur den Computerlexikographen.

Fur die 2. Auflage hat der Autor den aktuellen Stand der Forschung eingearbeitet; der MultiNet-Formalismus selbst und damit seine Beschreibung ist jedoch stabil geblieben."

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2019, held in Barcelona, Spain, in June 2019. The 22 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: genome analysis; systems biology; computational proteomics; machine and deep learning; and data analysis and methodology.

The majority of natural language processing (NLP) is English language processing, and while there is good language technology support for (standard varieties of) English, support for Albanian, Burmese, or Cebuano--and most other languages--remains limited. Being able to bridge this digital divide is important for scientific and democratic reasons but also represents an enormous growth potential. A key challenge for this to happen is learning to align basic meaning-bearing units of different languages. In this book, the authors survey and discuss recent and historical work on supervised and unsupervised learning of such alignments. Specifically, the book focuses on so-called cross-lingual word embeddings. The survey is intended to be systematic, using consistent notation and putting the available methods on comparable form, making it easy to compare wildly different approaches. In so doing, the authors establish previously unreported relations between these methods and are able to present a fast-growing literature in a very compact way. Furthermore, the authors discuss how best to evaluate cross-lingual word embedding methods and survey the resources available for students and researchers interested in this topic.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2019, held in Portoroz, Slovenia. The 39 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in three tracks: research track, resources track, and in-use track and deal with the following topical areas: distribution and decentralisation, velocity on the Web, research of research, ontologies and reasoning, linked data, natural language processing and information retrieval, semantic data management and data infrastructures, social and human aspects of the Semantic Web, and, machine learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Intelligent Technologies and Applications, INTAP 2018, held in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, in October 2018. The 68 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 251 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on AI and health; sentiment analysis; intelligent applications; social media analytics; business intelligence;Natural Language Processing; information extraction; machine learning; smart systems; semantic web; decision support systems; image analysis; automated software engineering.

The two-volume set LNBI 11465 and LNBI 11466 constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Work-Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering, IWBBIO 2019, held in Granada, Spain, in May 2019. The total of 97 papers presented in the proceedings, was carefully reviewed and selected from 301 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: High-throughput genomics: bioinformatics tools and medical applications; omics data acquisition, processing, and analysis; bioinformatics approaches for analyzing cancer sequencing data; next generation sequencing and sequence analysis; structural bioinformatics and function; telemedicine for smart homes and remote monitoring; clustering and analysis of biological sequences with optimization algorithms; and computational approaches for drug repurposing and personalized medicine. Part II: Bioinformatics for healthcare and diseases; computational genomics/proteomics; computational systems for modelling biological processes; biomedical engineering; biomedical image analysis; and biomedicine and e-health.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts.  Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models.  After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

This book presents a statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) framework for developing a speech synthesis system where the desired speech is generated from the parameters of vocal tract and excitation source. Throughout the book, the authors discuss novel source modeling techniques to enhance the naturalness and overall intelligibility of the SPSS system. This book provides several important methods and models for generating the excitation source parameters for enhancing the overall quality of synthesized speech. The contents of the book are useful for both researchers and system developers. For researchers, the book is useful for knowing the current state-of-the-art excitation source models for SPSS and further refining the source models to incorporate the realistic semantics present in the text. For system developers, the book is useful to integrate the sophisticated excitation source models mentioned to the latest models of mobile/smart phones.

This special issue of Copenhagen Studies in Language series is devoted to human and machine translation and human-computer interaction in translation, which were the two main foci of the 8th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science (NLPCS 2011), held at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, in August 2011. The volume includes the 19 papers which were selected for presentation at the workshop and the text of invite keynote lectures. The workshop provided an attractive interdisciplinary forum for fostering interactions among researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Processing (NLP) working within the paradigm of Cognitive Science (CS). The overall emphasis of the annual NLPCS research workshop series is on the contribution of cognitive science to language processing, including human and machine translation, human-machine interface design, conceptualisation, representation, meaning construction, ontology building, and text mining.

This book applies formal language and automata theory in the context of Tibetan computational linguistics; further, it constructs a Tibetan-spelling formal grammar system that generates a Tibetan-spelling formal language group, and an automata group that can recognize the language group. In addition, it investigates the application technologies of Tibetan-spelling formal language and automata. Given its creative and original approach, the book offers a valuable reference guide for researchers, teachers and graduate students in the field of computational linguistics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th China Workshop on Machine Translation, CWMT 2018, held in Wuyishan, China, in October 2018. The 9 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submissions and focus on all aspects of machine translation, including preprocessing, neural machine translation models, hybrid model, evaluation method, and post-editing.

Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of reasoning that appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some of the linguistic genres that are being studied include legal text, student essays, political discourse and debate, newspaper editorials, scientific writing, and others. The book starts with a discussion of the linguistic perspective, characteristics of argumentative language, and their relationship to certain other notions such as subjectivity. Besides the connection to linguistics, argumentation has for a long time been a topic in Artificial Intelligence, where the focus is on devising adequate representations and reasoning formalisms that capture the properties of argumentative exchange. It is generally very difficult to connect the two realms of reasoning and text analysis, but we are convinced that it should be attempted in the long term, and therefore we also touch upon some fundamentals of reasoning approaches. Then the book turns to its focus, the computational side of mining argumentation in text. We first introduce a number of annotated corpora that have been used in the research. From the NLP perspective, argumentation mining shares subtasks with research fields such as subjectivity and sentiment analysis, semantic relation extraction, and discourse parsing. Therefore, many technical approaches are being borrowed from those (and other) fields. We break argumentation mining into a series of subtasks, starting with the preparatory steps of classifying text as argumentative (or not) and segmenting it into elementary units. Then, central steps are the automatic identification of claims, and finding statements that support or oppose the claim. For certain applications, it is also of interest to compute a full structure of an argumentative constellation of statements. Next, we discuss a few steps that try to 'dig deeper': to infer the underlying reasoning pattern for a textual argument, to reconstruct unstated premises (so-called 'enthymemes'), and to evaluate the quality of the argumentation. We also take a brief look at 'the other side' of mining, i.e., the generation or synthesis of argumentative text. The book finishes with a summary of the argumentation mining tasks, a sketch of potential applications, and a--necessarily subjective--outlook for the field.