Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable.
This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a line of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state of the field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.
This volume is of specific interest to researchers, advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and teachers in the following areas: Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Language Engineering, Information Science, and Cognitive Science. It will also be of interest to designers, developers, and advanced users of natural language processing software and systems, including applications such as machine translation, information extraction, spoken dialogue, multimodal human-computer interaction, text mining, and semantic web technology.

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. Computational semantics is concerned with the computation of the meanings of linguistic objects such as text fragments, spoken dialogue utterances, and e-mail messages. The meaning of such an object is determined partly by linguistic information and partly by information from the context in which the object occurs. The information from these sources is combined by processes that infer which interpretation of the object applies in the given context. This applies not only to notoriously difficult aspects of interpreting linguistic objects, such as indexicals, anaphora, and metonymy, but also to establishing the precise reference of common nouns and the scopes of noun phrases. The central issue in computational semantics is how processes of finding and combining the relevant linguistic and contextual information into contextually appropriate meanings can be organised. Traditional approaches of applying context information to disambiguated natural language expressions do not work well, due to the massive ambiguity in natural language. Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations. Underspecified representation and inference are therefore the key topics in this book. The book is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who take an interest in the computation of meaning, and who want to know what is happening in this exciting field of research.

Parsing technology is concerned with finding syntactic structure in language. In parsing we have to deal with incomplete and not necessarily accurate formal descriptions of natural languages. Robustness and efficiency are among the main issuesin parsing. Corpora can be used to obtain frequency information about language use. This allows probabilistic parsing, an approach that aims at both robustness and efficiency increase. Approximation techniques, to be applied at the level of language description, parsing strategy, and syntactic representation, have the same objective. Approximation at the level of syntactic representation is also known as underspecification, a traditional technique to deal with syntactic ambiguity. In this book new parsing technologies are collected that aim at attacking the problems of robustness and efficiency by exactly these techniques: the design of probabilistic grammars and efficient probabilistic parsing algorithms, approximation techniques applied to grammars and parsers to increase parsing efficiency, and techniques for underspecification and the integration of semantic information in the syntactic analysis to deal with massive ambiguity. The book gives a state-of-the-art overview of current research and development in parsing technologies. In its chapters we see how probabilistic methods have entered the toolbox of computational linguistics in order to be applied in both parsing theory and parsing practice. The book is both a unique reference for researchers and an introduction to the field for interested graduate students.

In the current processes of political, economic and cultural changes serious cross-border forms of organized crime receive unprecedented attention as spectacular global media events, as 'threats' of all sorts, and as priority targets of criminal policy and political agendas. Most books on 'global organized crime' focus on one particular region, topic or event, and are written from one specific theoretical and disciplinary framework.
The renowned scholars who have contributed to this volume present up-to-date expertise on regions as distant and different as Russia, Colombia, the Netherlands, Israel, Peru and Britain. They tackle phenomena such as international drug trafficking, alien and women smuggling, terrorism, East European organized crime and financial crimes. They show not only how these issues are interrelated, but also the way in which they interact with social, economic and political legitimate structures. The contributors critically question the policies and strategies currently pursued. They explore different theoretical arguments from the perspective of their own disciplines, which include economics, criminology, political science and anthropology.

Computational semantics is concerned with computing the meanings of linguistic objects such as sentences, text fragments, and dialogue contributions. As such it is the interdisciplinary child of semantics, the study of meaning and its linguistic encoding, and computational linguistics, the discipline that is concerned with computations on linguistic objects.
From one parent computational semantics inherits concepts and techniques that have been developed under the banner of formal (or model-theoretic) semantics. This blend of logic and linguistics applies the methods of logic to the description of meaning. From the other parent the young discipline inherits methods and techniques for parsing sentences, for effective and efficient representation of syntactic structure and logical form, and for reasoning with semantic information. Computational semantics integrates and further develops these methods, concepts and techniques.
This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. It is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who want to know more about the algorithmic realisation of meaning in natural language and about what is happening in this field of research. There is a general introduction by the editors.

Parsing technology is concerned with finding syntactic structure in language. In parsing we have to deal with incomplete and not necessarily accurate formal descriptions of natural languages. Robustness and efficiency are among the main issuesin parsing. Corpora can be used to obtain frequency information about language use. This allows probabilistic parsing, an approach that aims at both robustness and efficiency increase. Approximation techniques, to be applied at the level of language description, parsing strategy, and syntactic representation, have the same objective. Approximation at the level of syntactic representation is also known as underspecification, a traditional technique to deal with syntactic ambiguity. In this book new parsing technologies are collected that aim at attacking the problems of robustness and efficiency by exactly these techniques: the design of probabilistic grammars and efficient probabilistic parsing algorithms, approximation techniques applied to grammars and parsers to increase parsing efficiency, and techniques for underspecification and the integration of semantic information in the syntactic analysis to deal with massive ambiguity. The book gives a state-of-the-art overview of current research and development in parsing technologies. In its chapters we see how probabilistic methods have entered the toolbox of computational linguistics in order to be applied in both parsing theory and parsing practice. The book is both a unique reference for researchers and an introduction to the field for interested graduate students.

Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools, and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable.

This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a series of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state of the field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.

In the current processes of political, economic and cultural changes serious cross-border forms of organized crime receive unprecedented attention as spectacular global media events, as 'threats' of all sorts, and as priority targets of criminal policy and political agendas. Most books on 'global organized crime' focus on one particular region, topic or event, and are written from one specific theoretical and disciplinary framework.
The renowned scholars who have contributed to this volume present up-to-date expertise on regions as distant and different as Russia, Colombia, the Netherlands, Israel, Peru and Britain. They tackle phenomena such as international drug trafficking, alien and women smuggling, terrorism, East European organized crime and financial crimes. They show not only how these issues are interrelated, but also the way in which they interact with social, economic and political legitimate structures. The contributors critically question the policies and strategies currently pursued. They explore different theoretical arguments from the perspective of their own disciplines, which include economics, criminology, political science and anthropology.

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. Computational semantics is concerned with the computation of the meanings of linguistic objects such as text fragments, spoken dialogue utterances, and e-mail messages. The meaning of such an object is determined partly by linguistic information and partly by information from the context in which the object occurs. The information from these sources is combined by processes that infer which interpretation of the object applies in the given context. This applies not only to notoriously difficult aspects of interpreting linguistic objects, such as indexicals, anaphora, and metonymy, but also to establishing the precise reference of common nouns and the scopes of noun phrases. The central issue in computational semantics is how processes of finding and combining the relevant linguistic and contextual information into contextually appropriate meanings can be organised. Traditional approaches of applying context information to disambiguated natural language expressions do not work well, due to the massive ambiguity in natural language. Recent work in computational semantics suggests, alternatively, to represent linguistic semantic information in formal structures with underspecification, and to apply context information in inference processes that result in further specification of these representations. Underspecified representation and inference are therefore the key topics in this book. The book is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who take an interest in the computation of meaning, and who want to know what is happening in this exciting field of research.

Parsing technologies are concerned with the automatic decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, with structures in formal or natural languages as their main, but certainly not their only, domain of application. The focus of Recent Advances in Parsing Technology is on parsing technologies for linguistic structures, but it also contains chapters concerned with parsing two or more dimensional languages. New and improved parsing technologies are important not only for achieving better performance in terms of efficiency, robustness, coverage, etc., but also because the developments in areas related to natural language processing give rise to new requirements on parsing technologies. Ongoing research in the areas of formal and computational linguistics and artificial intelligence lead to new formalisms for the representation of linguistic knowledge, and these formalisms and their application in such areas as machine translation and language-based interfaces call for new, effective approaches to parsing. Moreover, advances in speech technology and multimedia applications cause an increasing demand for parsing technologies where language, speech, and other modalities are fully integrated. Recent Advances in Parsing Technology presents an overview of recent developments in this area with an emphasis on new approaches for parsing modern, constraint-based formalisms on stochastic approaches to parsing, and on aspects of integrating syntactic parsing in further processing.

This book is a collection of papers written by outstanding researchers in the newly emerging field of computational semantics. It is aimed at those linguists, computer scientists, and logicians who want to know more about the algorithmic realization of meaning in natural language and about what is happening in this field of research. It includes a general introduction by the editors.

Das Buch richtet sich an Chirurgen, die in vertrauter Sprache und Form Antworten auf spezifische juristische Fragen und Probleme suchen. Die gemeinsame Erarbeitung durch einen Juristen und Chirurgen erlauben eine hohe Praxisrelevanz bei gleichzeitiger juristischer Genauigkeit. Typische Situationen und Probleme des chirurgischen Alltags in Klinik und Praxis werden juristisch durchleuchtet. Sofort umsetzbare Antworten werden erganzt durch Checklisten und Praxistipps. Zukunftige Entwicklungen wie der Einfluss des europaischen Rechts auf die tagliche Arbeit oder auch Netzstrukturen werden berucksichtigt. Ein detailliertes Stichwortverzeichnis erleichtert das Auffinden der entsprechenden Themen. Das Buch richtet sich an Chirurgen aber auch an Arzte in der chirurgischen Weiterbildung in Klinik, Praxis und Verwaltung, um insbesondere Unsicherheiten in Bezug auf juristische Fragen dieses Fachgebietes zu nehmen.

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Das Buch richtet sich an Chirurgen, die in vertrauter Sprache und Form Antworten auf spezifische juristische Fragen und Probleme suchen. Die gemeinsame Erarbeitung durch einen Juristen und Chirurgen erlauben eine hohe Praxisrelevanz bei gleichzeitiger juristischer Genauigkeit. Typische Situationen und Probleme des chirurgischen Alltags in Klinik und Praxis werden juristisch durchleuchtet. Sofort umsetzbare Antworten werden erganzt durch Checklisten und Praxistipps. Zukunftige Entwicklungen wie der Einfluss des europaischen Rechts auf die tagliche Arbeit oder auch Netzstrukturen werden berucksichtigt. Ein detailliertes Stichwortverzeichnis erleichtert das Auffinden der entsprechenden Themen. Das Buch richtet sich an Chirurgen aber auch an Arzte in der chirurgischen Weiterbildung in Klinik, Praxis und Verwaltung, um insbesondere Unsicherheiten in Bezug auf juristische Fragen dieses Fachgebietes zu nehmen.

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Dieses Buch befasst sich ausschliesslich mit dem Plattenepithelkarzinom der Speiserohre, die Einzelartikel zahlreicher Autoren werden in 5 Abschnitten zusammengefasst: Anatomie und Pathologie, Klinik und perioperative Massnahmen, chirurgische Strategie und Therapiekonzept, spezielle Techniken - Komplikationen und palliative Therapieformen. Besonderer Wert wird in diesem Buch darauf gelegt, die heute noch sehr unterschiedlichen Therapiestrategien und Konzepte besonders erfahrener Chirurgen auf diesem Gebiet aufzuzeigen und eine Standardtherapieempfehlung zu erarbeiten. Weiterhin werden aber auch Folgeerkrankungen aufgrund von operativen Oesopaguskarzinomen aufgezeigt und diskutiert. Gerade aber wegen der schlechten Prognose dieses Tumorleidens werden operativ - chemotherapeutische und radiologische Massnahmen besprochen und als wirksame Palliation empfohlen."