The study of prosody is perhaps the area of speech research which has undergone the most noticeable development during the past ten to fifteen years. As an indication of this, one can note, for example, that at the latest International Conference on Spoken Language Processing in Philadelphia (October 1996), there were more sessions devoted to prosody than to any other area. Not only that, but within other sessions, in particular those dealing with dialogue, several of the presentations dealt specifically with prosodic aspects of dialogue research. Even at the latest Eurospeech meeting in...

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...

In this book we address robustness issues at the speech recognition and natural language parsing levels, with a focus on feature extraction and noise robust recognition, adaptive systems, language modeling, parsing, and natural language understanding. This book attempts to give a clear overview of the main technologies used in language and speech processing, along with an extensive bibliography to enable topics of interest to be pursued further. It also brings together speech and language technologies often considered separately.
Robustness in Language and Speech Technology...

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book is unique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspects of natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actors in the field. Topics addressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodal dialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation.

This book reflects our own struggle to understand the semiclassical behaviour of quantized fields in the presence of boundaries. Along many years, motivated by the problems of quantum cosmology and quantum field theory, we have studied in detail the one-loop properties of massless spin-l/2 fields, Euclidean Maxwell the ory, gravitino potentials and Euclidean quantum gravity. Hence our book begins with a review of the physical and mathematical motivations for studying physical theories in the presence of boundaries, with emphasis on electrostatics, vacuum v Maxwell theory and quantum...

In Marcus (1980), deterministic parsers were introduced. These are parsers which satisfy the conditions of Marcus's determinism hypothesis, i.e., they are strongly deterministic in the sense that they do not simulate non- determinism in any way. In later work (Marcus et al. 1983) these parsers were modified to construct descriptions of trees rather than the trees them- selves. The resulting D-theory parsers, by working with these descriptions, are capable of capturing a certain amount of ambiguity in the structures they build. In this context, it is not clear what it means for a parser to...

Corpus-based methods will be found at the heart of many language and speech processing systems. This book provides an in-depth introduction to these technologies through chapters describing basic statistical modeling techniques for language and speech, the use of Hidden Markov Models in continuous speech recognition, the development of dialogue systems, part-of-speech tagging and partial parsing, data-oriented parsing and n-gram language modeling.
The book attempts to give both a clear overview of the main technologies used in language and speech processing, along with sufficient...

Researchers in a number of disciplines deal with large text sets requiring both text management and text analysis. Faced with a large amount of textual data collected in marketing surveys, literary investigations, historical archives and documentary data bases, these researchers require assistance with organizing, describing and comparing texts.
Exploring Textual Data demonstrates how exploratory multivariate statistical methods such as correspondence analysis and cluster analysis can be used to help investigate, assimilate and evaluate textual data....

This book is a revised version of my doctoral thesis which was submitted in April 1993. The main extension is a chapter on evaluation of the system de scribed in Chapter 8 as this is clearly an issue which was not treated in the original version. This required the collection of data, the development of a concept for diagnostic evaluation of linguistic word recognition systems and, of course, the actual evaluation of the system itself. The revisions made primarily concern the presentation of the latest version of the SILPA system described in an additional Subsection 8. 3, the development...

Sentiment analysis will play a key role in intelligent information extraction from text corpora ranging from telephone transcripts recorded surreptitiously to opinions expressed openly about consumer goods, books and films for example. In between, we have sentiments expressed covertly or overtly in order to discover the price of financial instruments, to influence a voting public or numerous other contexts.

Sentiment analysis may yet turn out to be as big a challenge as machine translation, corpus-based lexicography, and information extraction were in their time. This is a truly...