The impact of computer systems that can understand natural language will be tremendous. To develop this capability we need to be able to automatically and efficiently analyze large amounts of text. Manually devised rules are not sufficient to provide coverage to handle the complex structure of natural language, necessitating systems that can automatically learn from examples. To handle the flexibility of natural language, it has become standard practice to use statistical models, which assign probabilities for example to the different meanings of a word or the plausibility of grammatical constructions. This book develops a general coarse-to-fine framework for learning and inference in large statistical models for natural language processing. Coarse-to-fine approaches exploit a sequence of models which introduce complexity gradually. At the top of the sequence is a trivial model in which learning and inference are both cheap. Each subsequent model refines the previous one, until a final, full-complexity model is reached. Applications of this framework to syntactic parsing, speech recognition and machine translation are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in terms of accuracy and speed. The book is intended for students and researchers interested in statistical approaches to Natural Language Processing. Slav’s work Coarse-to-Fine Natural Language Processing represents a major advance in the area of syntactic parsing, and a great advertisement for the superiority of the machine-learning approach. Eugene Charniak (Brown University)

This two volume set of LNAI 11108 and LNAI 11109 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2018, held in Hohhot, China, in August 2018. The 55 full papers and 31 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 308 submissions. The papers of the first volume are organized in the following topics: conversational Bot/QA/IR; knowledge graph/IE; machine learning for NLP; machine translation; and NLP applications. The papers of the second volume are organized as follows: NLP for social network; NLP fundamentals; text mining; and short papers.

This book brings together work on Turkish natural language and speech processing over the last 25 years, covering numerous fundamental tasks ranging from morphological processing and language modeling, to full-fledged deep parsing and machine translation, as well as computational resources developed along the way to enable most of this work. Owing to its complex morphology and free constituent order, Turkish has proved to be a fascinating language for natural language and speech processing research and applications. After an overview of the aspects of Turkish that make it challenging for natural language and speech processing tasks, this book discusses in detail the main tasks and applications of Turkish natural language and speech processing. A compendium of the work on Turkish natural language and speech processing, it is a valuable reference for new researchers considering computational work on Turkish, as well as a one-stop resource for commercial and research institutions planning to develop applications for Turkish. It also serves as a blueprint for similar work on other Turkic languages such as Azeri, Turkmen and Uzbek.

This two-volume set of LNAI 13551 and 13552 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2022, held in Guilin, China, in September 2022. The 62 full papers, 21 poster papers, and 27 workshop papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 327 submissions. They are organized in the following areas: Fundamentals of NLP; Machine Translation and Multilinguality; Machine Learning for NLP; Information Extraction and Knowledge Graph; Summarization and Generation; Question Answering; Dialogue Systems; Social Media and Sentiment Analysis; NLP Applications and Text Mining; and Multimodality and Explainability.

This three-volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th National CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2023, held in Foshan, China, during October 12–15, 2023. The ____ regular papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 478 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: dialogue systems; fundamentals of NLP; information extraction and knowledge graph; machine learning for NLP; machine translation and multilinguality; multimodality and explainability; NLP applications and text mining; question answering; large language models; summarization and generation; student workshop; and evaluation workshop.