Current and New Directions in Discourse and Dialogue


Book Description

This volume covers key topics in the field from a variety of leading researchers. In one volume, readers gain exposure to several perspectives in the areas of corpus annotation and analysis, dialogue system construction, theoretical perspectives on communicative intention, context-based generation, and modeling of discourse structure. Based on the 2nd SIGdial workshop on Discourse and Dialogue held in conjunction with Eurospeech 2001, it is of interest to researchers and practitioners in dialogue and discourse processing.




Semantics. Volume 1


Book Description

No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (MAIENBORN ET AL.) BD. 33.1 HSK E-BOOK".







Corpus Linguistics. Volume 1


Book Description

This volume provides an up-to-date survey of the field of corpus linguistics, a field whose methodology has revolutionized much of the empirical work done in most fields of linguistic study over the past decade. Corpus linguistics investigates human language by starting out from large collections of texts - spoken, written, or recorded. These language corpora, which are now regularly available in electronic form, are the basis for quantitative and qualitative research on almost any question of linguistic interest. Many techniques that are in use in corpus linguistics today are rooted in the tradition of the late 18th and 19th century, when linguistics began to make use of mathematical and empirical methods. Modern corpus linguistics has used and developed these methods in close connection with computer science and computational linguistics. The handbook sketches the history of corpus linguistics, shows its potential, discusses its problems, and describes various methods of collecting, annotating, and searching corpora as well as processing corpus data. It also reports case studies that illustrate the wide range of linguistic research questions addressed in corpus linguistics. The over 60 articles included in the handbook are divided into five sections: (1) the origins and history of corpus linguistics and surveys of its relationship to central fields of linguistics (2) corpus compilation (3) corpus types (4) preprocessing of corpora (5) the use and exploitation of corpora. The final section gives an overview of the results of corpus studies obtained in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, stylometry, dialectology, and discourse analysis. It also reports on recent advances made in human and machine translation, contrastive studies, computer-assisted language learning, and automatic summarization. The contributors to the volume are internationally known experts in their respective fields. The handbook is intended for a wide audience ranging from teachers, university students, and scholars to anyone interested in the use of computers in linguistic analyses and applications.




Computing Meaning


Book Description

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies.




The Interactive Stance


Book Description

This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational - e.g. self-repair at the word level - to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. it also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quanitifcation and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by aruging that, unless we wish to excluse from analysis a large body of frequently occurrring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.




Multifunctionality in English


Book Description

This edited volume provides detailed analyses of multifunctional forms in English and offers hands-on approaches exemplifying relevant implications and useful applications to language and literacy educators in TESOL, ESL/EFL/EAL and research students in applied linguistics and education. The chapters cover: The multifunctionality of utterances in spoken and multimodal corpora, the multifunctionality of linguistic creativity in different genres, multifunctional pronouns in hard and soft sciences, and professional discourse in the university and secondary school contexts. The volume also offers a comparison of the multifunctionality of verbs between ESL textbooks, native written and spoken English corpora, and between ESL and L1 university students in writing a particular genre; comparisons of the multifunctionality of discourse markers between different registers and between L1 and L2 English speakers, as well as multifunctional metadiscourse markers in different disciplines and paradigms. With detailed analysis of authentic corpus data representing different varieties of English, specialized use in different contexts and disciplines, and practical teaching and learning applications, the volume bridges theory and practice, providing a creatively designed resource for students, educators and researchers looking to understand multifunctional forms in English.




The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis


Book Description

This Handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis phenomena, whereby the meaning of an utterance is richer than would be expected based solely on its linguistic form. Natural language abounds in these apparently incomplete expressions, such as I laughed but Ed didn't, in which the final portion of the sentence, the verb 'laugh', remains unpronounced but is still understood. The range of phenomena involved raise general and fundamental questions about the workings of grammar, but also constitute a treasure trove of fine-grained points of inter- and intralinguistic variation. The volume is divided into four parts. In the first, authors examine the role that ellipsis plays and how it is analysed in different theoretical frameworks and linguistic subdisciplines, such as HPSG, construction grammar, inquisitive semantics, and computational linguistics. Chapters in the second part highlight the usefulness of ellipsis as a diagnostic tool for other linguistic phenomena including movement and islands and codeswitching, while part III focuses instead on the types of elliptical constructions found in natural language, such as sluicing, gapping, and null complement anaphora. Finally, the last part of the book contains case studies that investigate elliptical phenomena in a wide variety of languages, including Dutch, Japanese, Persian, and Finnish Sign Language.




Spoken Dialogue Technology


Book Description

Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.




The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing


Book Description

This comprehensive reference work provides an overview of the concepts, methodologies, and applications in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Features contributions by the top researchers in the field, reflecting the work that is driving the discipline forward Includes an introduction to the major theoretical issues in these fields, as well as the central engineering applications that the work has produced Presents the major developments in an accessible way, explaining the close connection between scientific understanding of the computational properties of natural language and the creation of effective language technologies Serves as an invaluable state-of-the-art reference source for computational linguists and software engineers developing NLP applications in industrial research and development labs of software companies