Arabic, one of the official languages of the United Nations, is spoken by more than half a billion people around the world and is of increasing importance in today's political and economic spheres. The study of the Arabic language has a long and rich history: earliest grammatical accounts date from the 8th century and include full syntactic, morphological, and phonological analyses of the vernaculars and of Classical Arabic. In recent years the academic study of Arabic has become increasingly sophisticated and broad. This state-of-the-art volume presents the most recent research in Arabic linguistics from a theoretical point of view, including computational linguistics, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. It also covers sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis by looking at issues such as gender, urbanization, and language ideology. Underlying themes include the changing and evolving attitudes of speakers of Arabic and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation in the Middle East.

The aim of the European Cognitive Science Conference is the presentation of empirical, theoretical, and analytic work from all areas of interest in cognitive science, such as artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The focus is on interdisciplinary work that is either of interest for more than one of the research areas mentioned or integrates research methods from different fields. With contributions by cognitive scientists from 20 different countries, the papers in this volume reflect the origins of this conference, as well as its international scope.

This state-of-the-art survey comprises a selection of the material presented at the International Dagstuhl Seminar on Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in April 2005.

The seminar centered around an emerging de facto standard for time and event annotation: TimeML. The 9 papers included in the book constitute the thoroughly cross-reviewed and revised versions of selected summaries and findings presented and discussed at the seminar.

The papers feature current research and discuss open problems concerning annotation, temporal reasoning, and event identification. The main concern is with the determination of the effectivity of the TimeML language for consistent annotation, the determination of the usefulness of such annotations for further processing, and the question as to which modifications should be applied to the standard to improve its convenience in applications such as question-answering and information retrieval.

The aim of the European Cognitive Science Conference is the presentation of empirical, theoretical, and analytic work from all areas of interest in cognitive science, such as artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The focus is on interdisciplinary work that is either of interest for more than one of the research areas mentioned or integrates research methods from different fields. With contributions by cognitive scientists from 20 different countries, the papers in this volume reflect the origins of this conference, as well as its international scope.