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In 1992 it seemed very difficult to answer the question whether it would be possible to develop a portable system for the automatic recognition and translation of spon taneous speech. Previous research work on speech processing had focused on read speech only and international projects aimed at automated text translation had just been terminated without achieving their objectives. Within this context, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) made a careful analysis of all national and international research projects conducted in the field of speech and language technology before deciding to launch an eight-year basic-research lead project in which research groups were to cooperate in an interdisciplinary and international effort covering the disciplines of computer science, computational linguistics, translation science, signal processing, communi cation science and artificial intelligence. At some point, the project comprised up to 135 work packages with up to 33 research groups working on these packages. The project was controlled by means of a network plan. Every two years the project sit uation was assessed and the project goals were updated. An international scientific advisory board provided advice for BMBF. A new scientific approach was chosen for this project: coping with the com plexity of spontaneous speech with all its pertinent phenomena such as ambiguities, self-corrections, hesitations and disfluencies took precedence over the intended lex icon size. Another important aspect was that prosodic information was exploited at all processing stages.

Informatics - 10 Years Back, 10 Years Ahead presents a unique collection of expository papers on major current issues in the field of computer science and information technology. The 26 contributions written by leading researchers on personal invitation assess the state of the art of the field by looking back over the past decade, presenting important results, identifying relevant open problems, and developing visions for the decade to come. This book marks two remarkable and festive moments: the 10th anniversary of the International Research and Conference Center for Computer Science in Dagstuhl, Germany and the 2000th volume published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

This volume contains the papers prepared for the 2nd International Conference on Natural Language Processing, held 2-4 June in Patras, Greece. The conference program features invited talks and submitted papers, c- ering a wide range of NLP areas: text segmentation, morphological analysis, lexical knowledge acquisition and representation, grammar formalism and s- tacticparsing,discourse analysis,languagegeneration,man-machineinteraction, machine translation, word sense disambiguation, and information extraction. The program committee received 71 abstracts, of which unfortunately no more than 50% could be accepted. Every paper was reviewed by at least two reviewers. The fairness of the reviewing process is demonstrated by the broad spread of institutions and countries represented in the accepted papers. So many have contributed to the success of the conference. The primary credit, ofcourse, goes to theauthors andto the invitedspeakers. By theirpapers and their inspired talks they established the quality of the conference. Secondly, thanks should go to the referees and to the program committee members who did a thorough and conscientious job. It was not easy to select the papers to be presented. Last, but not least, my special thanks to the organizing committee for making this conference happen.

The series serves to propagate investigations into language usage, especially with respect to computational support. This includes all forms of text handling activity, not only interlingual translations, but also conversions carried out in response to different communicative tasks. Among the major topics are problems of text transfer and the interplay between human and machine activities.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics is written for those wanting to acquire comprehensive knowledge of China, the diaspora and the Sino-sphere communities through Chinese language. It examines how Chinese language is used in different contexts, and how the use of Chinese language affects culture, society, expression of self and persuasion of others; as well as how neurophysiological aspects of language disorder affect how we function and how the advance of technology changes the way the Chinese language is used and perceived. The Handbook concentrates on the cultural, societal and communicative characteristics of the Chinese language environment. Focusing on language use in action, in context and in vivo, this book intends to lay empirical grounds for collaboration and synergy among different fields.

This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the Second International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” (RANLP'97) held in Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria, September 1997. The aim of the conference was to give researchers the opportunity to present new results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) based both on traditional and modern theories and approaches. The conference received substantial interest — 167 submissions from more than 20 countries. The best papers from the proceedings were selected for this volume, in the hope that they reflect the most significant and promising trends (and successful results) in NLP. The contributions have been grouped according to the following topics: tagging, lexical issues and parsing, word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution, semantics, generation, machine translation, and categorisation and applications. The volume contains an extensive index.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Computational Models of Speech Pattern Processing, held in St. Helier, Jersey, UK, July 7-18, 1997