Studies in Computational Linguistics – serie

Many books have indexes, but most textual media have none. Newspapers, legal transcripts, conference proceedings, correspondence, video subtitles, and web pages are increasingly accessible with computers, yet are still without indexes or other sophisticated means of finding the excerpts most relevant to a reader's question. Better than an index, and much better than a keyword search, are the high-precision computerized question-answering systems explored in this book. Marius Pasca presents novel and robust methods for capturing the semantics of natural language questions and for finding the most relevant portions of texts. This research has led to a fully implemented and rigorously evaluated architecture that has produced experimental results showing great promise for the future of Internet search technology.

The finite-state paradigm of computer sciences has provided a basis for natural-language applications that are efficient, elegant and robust. This volume is a practical guide to finite-state theory and the affiliated programming languages lexc and xfst. Readers will learn how to write tokenizers, spelling checkers, and especially morphological analyzer/generators for words in English, French, Finnish, Hungarian and other languages. Included are graded introductions, examples, and exercises suitable for individual study as well as formal courses. These take advantage of widely tested lexc and xfst applications that are just becoming available for noncommercial use via the Internet.

How can computers distinguish the coherent from the unintelligible, recognize new information in a sentence, or draw inferences from a natural language passage? Computational semantics is an exciting new field that seeks answers to these questions, and this volume is the first textbook wholly devoted to this growing sub discipline. The book explains the underlying theoretical issues and fundamental techniques for computing semantic representations for fragments of natural language. This volume will be an essential text for computer scientists, linguists, and anyone interested in the development of computational semantics.

Since the dawn of the age of computers, researchers have been pushing the limits of available processing power to tackle the formidable challenge of developing software that can understand ordinary human language. At the forefront of this quest for the past fifty years, Martin Kay has been a constant source of new algorithms that have proven fundamental to progress in computational linguistics. "Collected Papers of Martin Kay", the first comprehensive collection of his works to date, opens a window into the growth of an increasingly important field of scientific research and development.