This edited collection of previously unpublished papers focuses on Centering Theory, an account of local discourse structure. Developed in the context of computational linguistics and cognitive science, Centering theory has attracted the attention of an international interdisciplinary audience. As the authors focus on naturally occurring data, they join the general trend towards empiricism in research on computational models of discourse, providing a significant contribution to a fast-moving field.

This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on (In)Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM (Schizophrenia and Language: Analysis and Modeling), a project developed to systemize the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers.

This volume is concerned with central themes in research on reference within the cognitive sciences. The articles, written by leading scholars in linguistics, computational linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, examine reference from a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by different research traditions and employing different methodologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, IJCNLP 2004, held in Hainan Island, China in March 2004. The 84 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 211 papers submitted. The papers are organized in topical sections on dialogue and discourse; FSA and parsing algorithms; information extractions and question answering; information retrieval; lexical semantics, ontologies, and linguistic resources; machine translation and multilinguality; NLP software and applications, semantic disambiguities; statistical models and machine learning; taggers, chunkers, and shallow parsers; text and sentence generation; text mining; theories and formalisms for morphology, syntax, and semantics; word segmentation; NLP in mobile information retrieval and user interfaces; and text mining in bioinformatics.

One of the most lively and contentious issues in contemporary linguistic theory concerns the elusive boundary between semantics and pragmatics, and Professor Laurence R. Horn of Yale University has been at the center of that debate ever since his groundbreaking 1972 UCLA dissertation. This volume in honor of Horn brings together the best of current work at the semantics/pragmatics boundary from a neo-Gricean perspective. Featuring the contributions of 22 leading researchers, it includes papers on implicature (Kent Bach), inference (Betty Birner), presupposition (Barbara Abbott), lexical semantics (Georgia Green, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Steve Kleinedler & Randall Eggert), negation (Pauline Jacobson, Frederick Newmeyer, Scott Schwenter), polarity (Donka Farkas, Anastasia Giannakidou, Michael Israel), implicit variables (Greg Carlson & Gianluca Storto), definiteness (Barbara Partee), reference (Ellen Prince, Andrew Kehler & Gregory Ward), and logic (Jerrold Sadock, Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Andrew Hartline). These original papers represent not only a fitting homage to Larry Horn, but also an important contribution to semantic and pragmatic theory.

The Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis is the authoritative reference for the theory behind Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a burgeoning mathematical method used to analyze how words make meaning, with the desired outcome to program machines to understand human commands via natural language rather than strict programming protocols. The first book

Anaphora processing is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines. The correct interpretation of anaphora has also become increasingly important for real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. This volume provides a unique overview of the processing of anaphora from a multi- and inter-disciplinary angle. It will be of interest and practical use to readers from fields as diverse as theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human language technology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and translation studies. The readership includes but is not limited to university lecturers, researchers, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.