A primary problem in the area of natural language processing has been semantic analysis. This book looks at the semantics of natural languages in context. It presents an approach to the computational processing of English text that combines current theories of knowledge representation and reasoning in Artificial Intelligence with the latest linguistic views of lexical semantics. The book will interest postgraduates and researchers in computational linguistics as well as industrial research groups specializing in natural language processing.

Though natural language processing has come far in the past twenty years, the technology has not achieved a major impact on society. Is this because of some fundamental limitation that cannot be overcome? Or because there has not been enough time to refine and apply theoretical work already done? Editors Madeleine Bates and Ralph Weischedel believe it is neither; they feel that several critical issues have never been adequately addressed in either theoretical or applied work, and they have invited capable researchers in the field to do that in Challenges in Natural Language Processing.

This innovative book develops a formal computational theory of writing systems and relates it to psycholinguistic results. Drawing on case studies of writing systems around the world, it offers specific proposals about the linguistic objects that are represented by orthographic elements and the formal constraints that hold of the mapping relation between them. Based on the insights gained, it posits a new taxonomy of writing systems. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, and speech...

In this particularly well written volume Graeme Hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation (conceptual analysis) by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities.

This book is concerned with the machine-based generation of natural language text and presents a formal analysis of problems, which in the main have previously only been approached descriptively. In the process of producing discourse, speakers and writers must decide what it is that they want to say and how to present it effectively. Kathleen McKeown's main concern is to identify and formalise principles of discourse so that they can be used in a computational process. The text generation theory she describes has been embodied in a computer program, TEXT, which, given a question, can produce...

This book is an investigation into the problems of generating natural language utterances to satisfy specific goals the speaker has in mind. It is thus an ambitious and significant contribution to research on language generation in artificial intelligence, which has previously concentrated in the main on the problem of translation from an internal semantic representation into the target language. Dr. Appelt's approach, based on a possible-worlds semantics of an intensional logic of knowledge and action, enables him to develop a formal representation of the effects of illocutionary acts and...

This innovative book develops a formal computational theory of writing systems and relates it to psycholinguistic results. Drawing on case studies of writing systems around the world, it offers specific proposals about the linguistic objects that are represented by orthographic elements and the formal constraints that hold of the mapping relation between them. Based on the insights gained, it posits a new taxonomy of writing systems. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and computational linguistics, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, and speech...

Volume One is our first book of short stories---for commuters, for your coffee break, lunch hour, or any time you need a quick, quality tale. ReadThisPlease covers a variety of subjects, such as romance, nature, family, drama, and humor with over eighty quality literary shorts for your reading pleasure. Now you can carry your own personal copy of Steven Bird's prosaic Pacifica, Sheila Cano's eerie The Saltchuck, Thomas Pryce's Running Out of Time, M Dawn's Truth Hurts and The Greenhouse, B G Lewis' Muse and Prota Caprine, Bruce Reisner's Gangle, Gaboo's Gina's Boudoir and other street level...