This book introduces Chinese language-processing issues and techniques to readers who already have a basic background in natural language processing (NLP). Since the major difference between Chinese and Western languages is at the word level, the book primarily focuses on Chinese morphological analysis and introduces the concept, structure, and interword semantics of Chinese words. The following topics are covered: a general introduction to Chinese NLP; Chinese characters, morphemes, and words and the characteristics of Chinese words that have to be considered in NLP applications; Chinese word segmentation; unknown word detection; word meaning and Chinese linguistic resources; interword semantics based on word collocation and NLP techniques for collocation extraction. Table of Contents: Introduction / Words in Chinese / Challenges in Chinese Morphological Processing / Chinese Word Segmentation / Unknown Word Identification / Word Meaning / Chinese Collocations / Automatic Chinese Collocation Extraction / Appendix / References / Author Biographies

AsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)2008wasthefourthAIRSconf- ence in the series established in 2004.The ?rst AIRS washeld in Beijing, China, the second in Jeju, Korea, and the third in Singapore. The AIRS conferences trace their roots to the successful Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops, which started in 1996. The AIRS series aims to bring together international researchers and dev- opers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in information retrieval. The scope of the conference encompasses the theory and practice of all aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video, and multimedia data. We are pleased to report that AIRS 2006 receiveda largenumber of 144 s- missions. Submissions came from all continents: Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Africa. We accepted 39 submissions as regular papers (27%) and 45 as short papers (31%). All submissions underwent double-blind revi- ing. We aregratefulto all the area Co-chairswho managedthe review processof their respective area e?ciently, as well as to all the Program Committee m- bers and additional reviewers for their e?orts to get reviews in on time despite the tight time schedule. We are pleased that the proceedings are published by Springer as part of their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and that the papers are EI-indexed.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, ICCPOL 2006, held in Singapore in December 2006, colocated with ISCSLP 2006, the 5th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing.

The 36 revised full papers and 20 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 169 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval, document classification, questions and answers, summarization, machine translation, word segmentation, chunking, abbreviation expansion, writing-system issues, parsing, semantics, and lexical resources.

The Theme of IJCNLP 2005: "NLP with Kimchee," a Conference with a Unique Flavor Welcometo IJCNLP 2005, thesecondannualconferenceof theAsian Federation ofNaturalLanguageProcessing(AFNLP). Followingthesuccessofthe?rstc- ference held in the beautiful cityof Sanya, Hainan Island, China, in March2004, IJCNLP 2005 is held in yet another attractive Asian resort, namely Jeju Island in Korea, on October 11-13, 2005 - the ideal place and season for appreciating mugunghwa, the rose of Sharon, and the national ?ower of Korea. On behalf of the Program Committee, we are excited to present these p- ceedings, which collect together the papers accepted for oral presentation at the conference. We received 289 submissions in total, from 32 economies all over the world: 77% from Asia, 11% from Europe, 0.3% from Africa, 1.7% from Australasia and 10% from North America. We are delighted to report that the popularity of IJCNLP has signi?cantly increased this year, with an increase of 37% from the 211 submissions from 16 economies and 3 continents received for IJCNLP 2004. With such a large number of submissions, the paper selection process was not easy. With the very considerable assistance of our 12 area chairs - Claire Gardent, Jamie Henderson, Chu-Ren Huang, Kentaro Inui, GaryLee, Kim-Teng Lua, Helen Meng, Diego Moll a, Jian-Yun Nie, Dragomir Radev, Manfred Stede, andMing Zhou- andthe 133internationalreviewers,90papers(31%)were- cepted for oral presentation and 62 papers (21%) were recommended as posters."

TheAsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)wasestablishedbytheAsian information retrieval community after the successful series of Information - trieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops held in six di?erent locations in Asia, starting from 1996. While the IRAL workshops had their focus on inf- mation retrieval problems involving Asian languages, AIRS covers a wider scope of applications, systems, technologies and theory aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and multimedia data. This extension of the scope re?ects and fosters increasing research activities in information retrieval in this region and the growing need for collaborations across subdisciplines. We are very pleased to report that we saw a sharp increase in the number of submissions and their quality, compared to the IRAL workshops. We received 106papersfromninecountriesinAsiaandNorthAmerica, fromwhich28papers (26%) were presented in oral sessions and 38 papers in poster sessions (36%). It was a great challenge for the Program Committee to select the best among the excellent papers. The low acceptance rates witness the success of this year's conference. After a long discussion between the AIRS 2004 Steering Committee and Springer, the publisher agreed to publish our proceedings in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series, which is SCI-indexed. We feel that this strongly attests to the excellent quality of the papers.

Social media platforms have been ubiquitously used in our daily lives and are steadily transforming the ways people communicate, socialize and conduct business. However, the growing popularity of social media adversely leads to wild spread of unreliable information. This in turn inevitably creates serious pollution problem of the global social media environment, which is harmful against humanity. For example, President Donald Trump used social media strategically to win in the 2016 USA Presidential Election. But it was found that many messages he delivered over social media were unproven, if not untrue. This problem must be prevented at all cost and as soon as possible. Thus, analysis of social media content is a pressing issue. It is a timely and important research subject worldwide. However, the short and informal nature of social media messages renders conventional content analysis, which is based on natural language processing (NLP), ineffective. This volume consists of a collection of highly relevant scientific articles published by the authors in different international conferences and journals, and is divided into three distinct parts: (I) search and filtering; (II) opinion and sentiment analysis; and (III) event detection and summarization. This book presents the latest advances in NLP technologies for social media content analysis, especially content on microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Weibo.