This book is an introduction to the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions, intended for linguists, psycholinguistics, and researchers work ing in the field of quantitative stylistics and anyone interested in quantitative aspects of lexical structure. Word frequency distributions are characterized by very large numbers of rare words. This property leads to strange statisti cal phenomena such as mean frequencies that systematically keep changing as the number of observations is increased, relative frequencies that even in large samples are not fully reliable estimators...

Linguists and engineers in Natural Language Processing tend to use electronic corpora more and more. Most research has long been limited to raw (unannotated) texts or to tagged texts (annotated with parts of speech only), but these approaches suffer from a word by word perspective. A new line of research involves corpora with richer annotations such as clauses and major constituents, grammatical functions and dependency links. The first parsed corpora were the English Lancaster treebank and Penn Treebank. New ones have recently been developed for other languages.
This book:

provides a...

Linguists and engineers in Natural Language Processing tend to use electronic corpora more and more. Most research has long been limited to raw (unannotated) texts or to tagged texts (annotated with parts of speech only), but these approaches suffer from a word by word perspective. A new line of research involves corpora with richer annotations such as clauses and major constituents, grammatical functions and dependency links. The first parsed corpora were the English Lancaster treebank and Penn Treebank. New ones have recently been developed for other languages.
This book:

provides a...

Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation is of relevance to researchers and program developers in the field of Machine Translation and especially Example-Based Machine Translation, bilingual text processing and cross-linguistic information retrieval. It is also of interest to translation technologists and localisation professionals.

Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation fills a void, because it is the first book to tackle the issue of EBMT in depth. It gives a state-of-the-art overview of EBMT techniques and provides a...

The origins of this book arise from the highly successful second SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue that was held in September 2001 in con junction with Eurospeech 2001. The original workshop proceedings consisted of 29 papers selected from 57 submissions, an exceptionally high number of submissions for a two day workshop. This book includes extended versions of 12 papers originally presented at the workshop. In addition, 4 other invited papers on major themes in discourse and dialogue research are included. There are three main themes addressed by the papers in this collection: (1)...

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...

Spoken dialog systems allow people to get information, conduct business, and be entertained, simply by speaking to a computer. There are hundreds of these systems currently in use, handling millions of interactions every day. How do they work? What problems do they solve? The goal of this book is to answer these questions and others like them, including:

How can I decide if a spoken dialog system is a good fit for the needs of my organization?

What's the difference between a voice user interface and a conventional graphical interface? What are the psychological...

Intelligent Multimodal Information Presentation relates to the ability of a computer system to automatically produce interactive information presentations, taking into account the specifics about the user, such as needs, interests and knowledge, and engaging in a collaborative interaction that helps the retrieval of relevant information and its understanding on the part of the user.

The volume includes descriptions of some of the most representative recent works on Intelligent Information Presentation and a view of the challenges ahead.

Audience:...

This book is based on publications from the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments held at Kloster Irsee, Germany, in 2002. The workshop covered various aspects of devel- ment and evaluation of spoken multimodal dialogue systems and components with particular emphasis on mobile environments, and discussed the state-- the-art within this area. On the development side the major aspects addressed include speech recognition, dialogue management, multimodal output gene- tion, system architectures, full applications, and user interface issues. On the...

A great deal of attention has been devoted in the past ten years in the lingu- tic and computational linguistics communities to the syntax and the semantics of nouns, verbs and also, but to a lesser extent, to adjectives. Related p- nomena such as quanti?cation or tense and aspect have motivated a number of in-depth studies and projects. In contrast, prepositions have received less attention. The reasons are quite clear: prepositions are highly polysemic, p- sibly more so than adjectives, and linguistic realizations are extremely dif?cult to predict, not to mention the dif?culty of...