This text introduces the semantic aspects of natural language processing and its applications. Topics covered include: measuring word meaning similarity, multi-lingual querying, and parametric theory, named entity recognition, semantics, query language, the and the nature of language. The book also emphasizes the portions of mathematics needed to understand the discussed algorithms.

This volume contains the papers presented at NLDB 2008, the 13th Inter- tional Conference on Natural Language and Information Systems, held June 25-27,2008.It also containssome of the best researchproposalsas submitted to theNLDB2008doctoralsymposiumheldonJune24,2008.Theprogrammealso includes three invited talks covering the main perspectives of the application of naturallanguageto informationsystems: the wayhumansprocess, communicate and understand natural language, what are the implications and challenges - wardssemanticsearchforthenewWebgeneration, hownaturallanguageapplies to the well-established database way of querying as a means to unlock data and information for end users. We received 68 papers as regular papers for the main conference and 14 short papers for the doctoral symposium. Each paper for the main conference was assigned four reviewers based on the preferences expressed by the Program Committee members. We ensured that every paper had at least two reviewers that expressedinterest in reviewing it or indicated that they could reviewit. We ensured that each paper got at least three reviews. As a result, only 10% of the papers were reviewed by three reviewers. The Conference Chair and the two Program Committee Co-chairs acted as Meta-Reviewers.Eachofthemtookroughly1/3ofthepapers(obviouslyrespe- ing con?icts of interest), for which s/he was responsible. This included studying the reviews, launching discussions and asking for clari?cations whenever nec- sary, as well as studying the papers whenever a need for an informed additional opinion arose or when the reviewers' notes did not allow for a decision.

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.

As organizations, businesses, and other institutions work to move forward during a new era of ubiquitous modern technology, new computing and technology implementation strategies are necessary to harness the shared knowledge of individuals to advance their organizations as a whole. Intelligent and Knowledge-Based Computing for Business and Organizational Advancements examines the emerging computing paradigm of Collective Intelligence (CI). The global contributions contained in this publication will prove to be essential to both researchers and practitioners in the computer and information science communities as these populations move toward a new period of fully technology-integrated business.