Incremental Conceptualization for Language Production


Book Description

Incremental Conceptualization for Language Production discusses the simultaneous actions involved in thinking and speaking, as well as the piecemeal way in which individuals construct an internal representation of the external world and use this internal representation for speaking. Author Markus Guhe presents the first computational model that captures these observations in a cognitively adequate fashion. The volume is an innovative look at the mind’s process of producing semantic representations that can be transformed into language. The first section of the book illustrates four stages of conceptualization: construction of a conceptual representation; selection of content to be verbalized; linearization of the selected content; and generation of preverbal messages. Guhe then analyzes incremental processing — processing that takes place in a piecemeal fashion — and offers a blueprint of incremental models while discussing the dimensions along which the processing principles and the blueprint varies. Finally, incremental processing and conceptualization merge to form the incremental conceptualiser model (inC). The effective use of inC is demonstrated through simulations carried out with the implementation of the model. Intended for researchers in cognitive science, particularly cognitive modeling of language, this volume will also interest researchers in artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistics and psychology.







Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language Production


Book Description

This volume comprises contributions from different disciplines (cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience) concerned with the generation of natural speech. It summarizes the outcome of a six-year long priority program funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) that aimed at bringing together colleagues with different viewpoints but sharing a principal interest in the cognitive processes underlying language production. The result is a state-of-the-art discussion of one of the most fascinating branches of human behavior taking into account a particularly rich multidisciplinary empirical data base.







Natural Language Generation in Interactive Systems


Book Description

An informative and comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in natural language generation (NLG) for interactive systems, this guide serves to introduce graduate students and new researchers to the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, while inspiring them with ideas for future research. Detailing the techniques and challenges of NLG for interactive applications, it focuses on the research into systems that model collaborativity and uncertainty, are capable of being scaled incrementally, and can engage with the user effectively. A range of real-world case studies is also included. The book and the accompanying website feature a comprehensive bibliography, and refer the reader to corpora, data, software and other resources for pursuing research on natural language generation and interactive systems, including dialog systems, multimodal interfaces and assistive technologies. It is an ideal resource for students and researchers in computational linguistics, natural language processing and related fields.




Modern Perspectives in Type-Theoretical Semantics


Book Description

This book is a collective volume that reports the state of the art in the applications of type theory to linguistic semantics. The volume fills a 20 year gap from the last published book on the issue and aspires to bring researchers closer to cutting edge alternatives in formal semantics research. It consists of unpublished work by some key researchers on various issues related to the type theoretical study of formal semantics and further exemplifies the advantages of using modern type theoretical approaches to linguistic semantics. Themes that are covered include modern developments of type theories in formal semantics, foundational issues in linguistic semantics like anaphora, modality and plurals, innovational interdisciplinary research like the introduction of probability theory to type theories as well as computational implementations of type theoretical approaches. This volume will be of great interest to formal semanticists that are looking for alternative ways to study linguistic semantics, but will also be of interest to theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians that are interested in the applications of type theory.




The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics


Book Description

Ruslan Mitkov's highly successful Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics has been substantially revised and expanded in this second edition. Alongside updated accounts of the topics covered in the first edition, it includes 17 new chapters on subjects such as semantic role-labelling, text-to-speech synthesis, translation technology, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and the application of Natural Language Processing in educational and biomedical contexts, among many others. The volume is divided into four parts that examine, respectively: the linguistic fundamentals of computational linguistics; the methods and resources used, such as statistical modelling, machine learning, and corpus annotation; key language processing tasks including text segmentation, anaphora resolution, and speech recognition; and the major applications of Natural Language Processing, from machine translation to author profiling. The book will be an essential reference for researchers and students in computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, as well as those working in related industries.




Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics


Book Description

This volume provides insight into linguistic pragmatics from the perspective of linguists who have been influenced by philosophy. Theory of Mind and perspectives on point of view are presented along with other topics including: semantics vs. semiotics, clinical pragmatics, explicatures, cancellability of explicatures, interactive language use, reference, common ground, presupposition, definiteness, logophoricity and point of view in connection with pragmatic inference, pragmemes and language games, pragmatics and artificial languages, the mechanism of the form/content correlation from a pragmatic point of view, amongst other issues relating to language use. Relevance Theory is introduced as an important framework, allowing readers to familiarize themselves with technical details and linguistic terminology. This book follows on from the first volume: both contain the work of world renowned experts who discuss theories relevant to pragmatics. Here, the relationship between semantics and pragmatics is explored: conversational explicatures are a way to bridge the gap in semantics between underdetermined logical forms and full propositional content. These volumes are written in an accessible way and work well both as a stimulus to further research and as a guide to less experienced researchers and students who would like to know more about this vast, complex, and difficult field of inquiry.




Alignment in Communication


Book Description

Alignment in Communication is a novel direction in communication research, which focuses on interactive adaptation processes assumed to be more or less automatic in humans. It offers an alternative to established theories of human communication and also has important implications for human-machine interaction. A collection of articles by international researchers in linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, this book provides evidence on why such alignment occurs and the role it plays in communication. Complemented by a discussion of methodologies and explanatory frameworks from dialogue theory, it presents cornerstones of an emerging new theory of communication. The ultimate purpose is to extend our knowledge about human communication, as well as creating a foundation for natural multimodal dialogue in human-machine interaction. Its cross-disciplinary nature makes the book a useful reference for cognitive scientists, linguists, psychologists, and language philosophers, as well as engineers developing conversational agents and social robots.




Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization


Book Description

The relationship between language and conceptualization remains one of the major puzzles in language research. This monograph addresses this issue by means of an in depth corpus based and experimental investigation of the major types of expressions of epistemic modality in Dutch, German and English. By adopting a systematic functional orientation, the book explains a whole range of peculiarities of epistemic expression forms (synchronically and diachronically), and it offers a clear perspective on which cognitive systems are needed to get from the concept of epistemic modality to its linguistic expression. On that basis the author postulates a sophisticated, layered view of human conceptualization. This book is of interest both to scholars working on modality and related semantic dimensions, and to the interdisciplinary field of researchers concerned with the cognitive systems involved in language use.