This anthology is aimed at speech engineers, system developers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and others interested in utilizing natural-language technology in both spoken and text-based applications.

Preface.- Making the Case for an Open, Unified System Architecture in Response to Rapid Developments in the Natural Language Industry: Translingual Automatic Language Exploration System (TALES).- The Burgeoning of Medical Social-Media Postings and the Need for Improved Natural Language Mapping Tools.- Machine Translation: the Enterprise Point of View.- Speech-Enabled Unified Communications: Overcoming the Multilingual Challenges of the European Market.- Exploiting Lexical Sensitivity in Performing Word-Sense Disambiguation.- Summarizing Short Texts through a Discourse-Centered Approach in a Multilingual Context.- Handling Two Difficult Challenges for Text-to-Speech Synthesis Systems:  Out-of-Vocabulary Words and Prosody -- A Case Study in Romanian.- MAP: An Abstraction-Based Metaphor Analysis Program for Overcoming Cross-Modal Challenges.- Translation of Idiomatic Expressions across Different Languages: A Study of the Effectiveness of TransSearch.- Argumentation-Based Dialog Systems for Medical Training.- Design of Dialog-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Simulate Human-to-Human Tutoring.- TCAD: Vocabulary Acquisition Tool for Motivating Bilingual Pupils with Hearing Impairments in Learning English.- A Hybrid Approach to Automated Rating of Foreign Language Proficiency Using Oral Test Responses.- Multilingual Systems, Translation Technology and Their Impact on the Translator’s Profession.- Editors’ biographies.

Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems brings humans and machines closer together by showing how linguistic complexities that confound the speech systems of today can be handled effectively by sophisticated natural-language technology. Some of the most vexing natural-language problems that are addressed in this book entail   recognizing and processing idiomatic expressions, understanding metaphors, matching an anaphor correctly with its antecedent, performing word-sense disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary words and phrases. This fourteen-chapter anthology consists of contributions from industry scientists and from academicians working at major universities in North America and Europe. They include researchers who have played a central role in DARPA-funded programs and developers who craft real-world solutions for corporations. These contributing authors analyze the role of natural language technology in the global marketplace; they explore the need for natural language mapping-tools that can cull important data from the vast array of social-media postings; they describe innovative Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and applications; and they offer NLP tools for physicians, educators, and translators.  Their contributions constitute diverse and multifaceted solutions for the knotty natural-language problems that permeate everyday human communications.Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems is designed for speech engineers, system developers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and others interested in utilizing natural-language technology in both spoken and text-based applications. 

Brings humans and machines closer together by showing how linguistic complexities that confound the speech systems of today can be handled effectively by sophisticated natural-language technology Proposes innovative solutions to the problems of recognizing and processing idiomatic expressions, understanding metaphors, matching an anaphor correctly with its antecedent, performing word-sense disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary words and phrases Provides an analysis of the role of natural language technology in the global marketplace Explores the need for natural language mapping-tools that can cull important data from the vast array of social-media postings Covers innovative Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and applications Offers innovative NLP tools for physicians, educators, and translators Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras