This book describes effective methods for automatically analyzing a sentence, based on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the elements that form it. To tackle ambiguities, the authors use selectional preferences (SP), which measure how well two words fit together semantically in a sentence. Today, many disciplines require automatic text analysis based on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of language and as such several techniques for parsing sentences have been proposed. Which is better? In this book the authors begin with simple heuristics before moving on to more complex methods that identify nouns and verbs and then aggregate modifiers, and lastly discuss methods that can handle complex subordinate and relative clauses. During this process, several ambiguities arise. SP are commonly determined on the basis of the association between a pair of words. However, in many cases, SP depend on more words. For example, something (such as grass) may be edible, depending on who is eating it (a cow?). Moreover, things such as popcorn are usually eaten at the movies, and not in a restaurant. The authors deal with these phenomena from different points of view.

This book contains the best selected papers of two Satellite Events held at the 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2016, in November 2016 in Bologna, Italy: The Second International Workshop on Educational Knowledge Management, EKM 2016, and the First Workshop: Detection, Representation and Management of Concept Drift in Linked Open Data, Drift-an-LOD 2016. The 6 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from the 13 full papers that were accepted for presentation at the conference from the initial 82 submissions. This volume also contains the 37 accepted contributions for the EKAW 2016 tutorials, demo and poster sessions, and the doctoral consortium. The special focus of this year's EKAW was "evolving knowledge", which concerns all aspects of the management and acquisition of knowledge representations of evolving, contextual, and local models. This includes change management, trend detection, model evolution, streaming data and stream reasoning, event processing, time-and space dependent models, contextual and local knowledge representations with a special emphasis on the evolvability and localization of knowledge and the correct usage of these limits.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mining Intelligence and Knowledge Exploration, MIKE 2016, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in November 2016. The 18 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions. Accepted papers were grouped into various subtopics including information retrieval, machine learning, pattern recognition, knowledge discovery, classification, clustering, image processing, network security, speech processing, natural language processing, language, cognition and computation, fuzzy sets, and business intelligence.

The two-volume set LNCS 10350 and 10351 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2017, held in Arras, France, in June 2017. The 70 revised full papers presented together with 45 short papers and 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 180 submissions. They are organized in topical sections: constraints, planning, and optimization; data mining and machine learning; sensors, signal processing, and data fusion; recommender systems; decision support systems; knowledge representation and reasoning; navigation, control, and autonome agents; sentiment analysis and social media; games, computer vision; and animation; uncertainty management; graphical models: from theory to applications; anomaly detection; agronomy and artificial intelligence; applications of argumentation; intelligent systems in healthcare and mhealth for health outcomes; and innovative applications of textual analysis based on AI.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2017, held in London, UK, in June 2017. The 21 full papers presented in this book together with 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: foundations of flexible querying; recommendation and ranking; technologies for flexible representations and querying; knowledge discovery and information/data retrieval; intuitionistic sets; and generalized net model.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCL 2017, and the 5th International Symposium on Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data, NLP-NABD 2017, held in Nanjing, China, in October 2017. The 39 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 272 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Fundamental theory and methods of computational linguistics; Machine translation and multilingual information processing; Knowledge graph and information extraction; Language resource and evaluation; Information retrieval and question answering; Text classification and summarization; Social computing and sentiment analysis; NLP applications; Minority language information processing.

This book proposes a new model for the translation-oriented analysis of multimodal source texts. The author guides the reader through semiotics, multimodality, pragmatics and translation studies on a quest for the meaning-making mechanics of texts that combine images and words. She openly challenges the traditional view that sees translators focusing their attention mostly on the linguistic aspect of source material in their work. The central theoretical pivot around which the analytical model revolves is that multimodal texts communicate through individual images and linguistic units, as well as through the interaction among textual resources and the text's interaction with its context of reference. This three-dimensional view offers a holistic understanding of multimodal texts and their potential translation issues to help translators improve the way they communicate multimodally across languages and cultures. This book will appeal to researchers in the fields of translation studies, multimodality and pragmatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language and Computation, TbiLLC 2015, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in September 2015. The 18 papers in this book were selected from the invited submissions of full, revised versions of the 37 short papers presented at the conference, and one invited talk. Each paper has passed through a rigorous peer-review process before being accepted for publication. The biennial conference series and the proceedings are representative of the aims of the organizing institutes: to promote the integrated study of logic, information and language. The scientific program consisted of tutorials, invited lectures, contributed talks, and two workshops.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second COST Action IC1302 International KEYSTONE Conference on Semantic Keyword-Based Search on Structured Data Sources, IKC 2016, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in September 2016. The 15 revised full papers and 2 invited papers are reviewed and selected from 18 initial submissions and cover the areas of keyword extraction, natural language searches, graph databases, information retrieval techniques for keyword search and document retrieval.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the 5th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2016, and the 24th International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2016, held in Kunming, China, in December 2016. The 48 revised full papers presented together with 41 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 216 submissions. The papers cover fundamental research in language computing, multi-lingual access, web mining/text mining, machine learning for NLP, knowledge graph, NLP for social network, as well as applications in language computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IberSPEECH 2016 Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in November 2016. The 27 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The selected articles in this volume are organized into four different topics: Speech Production, Analysis, Coding and Synthesis; Automatic Speech Recognition; Paralinguistic Speaker Trait Characterization; Speech and Language Technologies in Different Application Fields

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th China National Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCL 2016, and the 4th International Symposium on Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data, NLP-NABD 2016, held in Yantai City, China, in October 2016. The 29 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 85 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: semantics; machine translation; multilinguality in NLP; knowledge graph and information extraction; linguistic resource annotation and evaluation; information retrieval and question answering; text classification and summarization; social computing and sentiment analysis; and NLP applications.

How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference of the CLEF Initiative, CLEF 2016, held in Toulouse, France, in September 2016. The 10 full papers and 8 short papers presented together with 5 best of the labs papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. In addition to these talks, this volume contains the results of 7 benchmarking labs reporting their year long activities in overview talks and lab sessions. The papers address all aspects of information access in any modality and language and cover a broad rangeof topics in the fields of multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2013, held in Poznan, Poland, in December 2013. The 31 revised and in many cases substantially extended papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions.The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of Human Language Technologies and illustrate a large thematic coverage of the LTC conferences. To make the presentation of the papers possibly transparent we have "structured" them into 9 chapters. These are: Speech Processing, Morphology, Parsing Related Issues, Computational Semantics, Digital Language Resources, Ontologies and Wordnets, Written Text and Document Processing, Information and Data Extraction, and Less-Resourced Languages.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2016, held in Montreal, QC, Canada, in July 2016. The 32 full papers and 4 abstracts of invited papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. This volume presents current developments in formal languages and automata, especially from the following topics and areas: combinatorial and algebraic properties of words and languages; grammars, acceptors and transducers for strings, trees, graphs, arrays; algebraic theories for automata and languages; codes; efficient text algorithms; symbolic dynamics; decision problems; relationships to complexity theory and logic; picture description and analysis; polyominoes and bidimentional patterns; cryptography; concurrency; cellular automata; bio-inspried computing; quantum computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2016, held in Aberdeen, UK, in July 2016. The 11 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions. The topics range from natural languages which are controlled, to controlled languages with a natural language flavour; and from more theoretical results to interfaces, reasoning engines and real-life applications of CNLs.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2016, held in Salford, UK, in June 2016. The 17 full papers, 22 short papers, and 13 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: theoretical aspects, algorithms, applications, architectures for applied and integrated NLP, resources for applied NLP, and other aspects of NLP.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2016, held in Victoria, BC, Canada, in May/June 2016. The 12 full papers and 27 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The focus of the conference was on the following subjects: actions and behaviours, audio and visual recognition, natural language processing, reasoning and learning, streams and distributed computing.

This book serves as a starting point for Semantic Web (SW) students and researchers interested in discovering what Natural Language Processing (NLP) has to offer. NLP can effectively help uncover the large portions of data held as unstructured text in natural language, thus augmenting the real content of the Semantic Web in a significant and lasting way. The book covers the basics of NLP, with a focus on Natural Language Understanding (NLU), referring to semantic processing, information extraction and knowledge acquisition, which are seen as the key links between the SW and NLP communities. Major emphasis is placed on mining sentences in search of entities and relations. In the course of this "quest", challenges will be encountered for various text analysis tasks, including part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic disambiguation, named entity recognition and relation extraction. Standard algorithms associated with these tasks are presented to provide an understanding of the fundamental concepts. Furthermore, the importance of experimental design and result analysis is emphasized, and accordingly, most chapters include small experiments on corpus data with quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results. This book is divided into four parts. Part I "Searching for Entities in Text" is dedicated to the search for entities in textual data. Next, Part II "Working with Corpora" investigates corpora as valuable resources for NLP work. In turn, Part III "Semantic Grounding and Relatedness" focuses on the process of linking surface forms found in text to entities in resources. Finally, Part IV "Knowledge Acquisition" delves into the world of relations and relation extraction. The book also includes three appendices: "A Look into the Semantic Web" gives a brief overview of the Semantic Web and is intended to bring readers less familiar with the Semantic Web up to speed, so that they too can fully benefit from the material of this book. "NLP Tools and Platforms" provides information about NLP platforms and tools, while "Relation Lists" gathers lists of relations under different categories, showing how relations can be varied and serve different purposes. And finally, the book includes a glossary of over 200 terms commonly used in NLP. The book offers a valuable resource for graduate students specializing in SW technologies and professionals looking for new tools to improve the applicability of SW techniques in everyday life - or, in short, everyone looking to learn about NLP in order to expand his or her horizons. It provides a wealth of information for readers new to both fields, helping them understand the underlying principles and the challenges they may encounter.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 5th Joint International Semantic Technology Conference, JIST 2015, held in Yichang, China, in November 2015. The theme of the JIST 2015 conference was "Big Data and Social Media". The JIST 2015 conference consisted of main technical tracks including 2 keynotes, 2 invited talks, a regular technical paper track (full and short papers), an in-use track, a poster and demo session, workshop, and tutorial. The 14 full and 8 short papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The paper cover the following topics: ontology and reasoning, linked data, learning and discovery, RDF and query, knowledge graph, knowledge integration, query and recommendation, and applications of semantic technologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 16th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2015, held in Beijing, China, in May 2015. The 64 regular and 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 248 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: lexical semantics; lexical resources; lexicology; natural language processing and applications; and syntax.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th CCF Conference, NLPCC 2015, held in Nanchang, China, in October 2015. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 22 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 238 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on fundamentals on language computing; applications on language computing; NLP for search technology and ads; web mining; knowledge acquisition and information extraction.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2015, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, in September 2015. The 67 papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 138 submissions. They focus on topics such as corpora and language resources; speech recognition; tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech; speech and spoken language generation; semantic processing of text and speech; integrating applications of text and speech processing; automatic dialogue systems; as well as multimodal techniques and modelling.

This book explains how can be created information extraction (IE) applications that are able to tap the vast amount of relevant information available in natural language sources: Internet pages, official documents such as laws and regulations, books and newspapers, and social web. Readers are introduced to the problem of IE and its current challenges and limitations, supported with examples. The book discusses the need to fill the gap between documents, data, and people, and provides a broad overview of the technology supporting IE. The authors present a generic architecture for developing systems that are able to learn how to extract relevant information from natural language documents, and illustrate how to implement working systems using state-of-the-art and freely available software tools. The book also discusses concrete applications illustrating IE uses. * Provides an overview of state-of-the-art technology in information extraction (IE), discussing achievements and limitations for the software developer and providing references for specialized literature in the area * Presents a comprehensive list of freely available, high quality software for several subtasks of IE and for several natural languages * Describes a generic architecture that can learn how to extract information for a given application domain