This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language is an invaluable resource for language learners and linguists of Chinese worldwide, those interested readers of Chinese literature and cultures, and scholars in Chinese studies. Featuring the research on the changing landscape of the Chinese language by a number of eminent academics in the field, this volume will meet the academic, linguistic and pedagogical needs of anyone interested in the Chinese language: from Sinologists to Chinese linguists, as well as teachers and learners of Chinese as a second language. The encyclopedia explores a range of topics: from research on oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, to Chinese language acquisition, to the language of the mass media. This reference offers a guide to shifts over time in thinking about the Chinese language as well as providing an overview of contemporary themes, debates and research interests. The editors and contributors are assisted by an editorial board comprised of the best and most experienced sinologists world-wide. The reference includes an introduction, written by the editor, which places the assembled texts in their historical and intellectual context. The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.

This book conveys the fundamentals of Linked Lexical Knowledge Bases (LLKB) and sheds light on their different aspects from various perspectives, focusing on their construction and use in natural language processing (NLP). It characterizes a wide range of both expert-based and collaboratively constructed lexical knowledge bases. Only basic familiarity with NLP is required and this book has been written for both students and researchers in NLP and related fields who are interested in knowledge-based approaches to language analysis and their applications. Lexical Knowledge Bases (LKBs) are indispensable in many areas of natural language processing, as they encode human knowledge of language in machine readable form, and as such, they are required as a reference when machines attempt to interpret natural language in accordance with human perception. In recent years, numerous research efforts have led to the insight that to make the best use of available knowledge, the orchestrated exploitation of different LKBs is necessary. This allows us to not only extend the range of covered words and senses, but also gives us the opportunity to obtain a richer knowledge representation when a particular meaning of a word is covered in more than one resource. Examples where such an orchestrated usage of LKBs proved beneficial include word sense disambiguation, semantic role labeling, semantic parsing, and text classification. This book presents different kinds of automatic, manual, and collaborative linkings between LKBs. A special chapter is devoted to the linking algorithms employing text-based, graph-based, and joint modeling methods. Following this, it presents a set of higher-level NLP tasks and algorithms, effectively utilizing the knowledge in LLKBs. Among them, you will find advanced methods, e.g., distant supervision, or continuous vector space models of knowledge bases (KB), that have become widely used at the time of this book's writing. Finally, multilingual applications of LLKB's, such as cross-lingual semantic relatedness and computer-aided translation are discussed, as well as tools and interfaces for exploring LLKBs, followed by conclusions and future research directions.

Adsorption of Information Technology to Software Reliability.

I designed a method to automatically acquire knowledge from dictionaries of near-synonym discrimination written for human readers. An unsupervised decision-list algorithm learns patterns and words for classes of distinctions. The patterns are learned automatically, followed by a manual validation step. The extraction of distinctions between near-synonyms is entirely automatic. The main types of distinctions are: stylistic (for example, inebriated is more formal than drunk), attitudinal (for example, skinny is more pejorative than slim), and denotational (for example, blunder implies accident and ignorance, while error does not). Current natural language generation or machine translation systems cannot distinguish among near-synonyms---words that share the same core meaning but vary in their lexical nuances. This is due to a lack of knowledge about differences between near-synonyms in existing computational lexical resources. I enriched the initial LKB of NS with information extracted from other sources. First, information about the senses of the near-synonym was added (WordNet senses). Second, knowledge about the collocational behaviour of the near-synonyms was acquired from free text. Collocations between a word and the near-synonyms in a dictionary entry were classified into: preferred collocations, less-preferred collocations, and anti-collocations. Third, knowledge about distinctions between near-synonyms was acquired from machine-readable dictionaries (the General Inquirer and the Macquarie Dictionary). These distinctions were merged with the initial LKB of NS, and inconsistencies were resolved. The goal of this thesis is to automatically acquire a lexical knowledge-base of near-synonym differences (LKB of NS) from multiple sources, and to show how it can be used in a practical natural language processing system. The generic LKB of NS needs to be customized in order to be used in a natural language processing system. The parts that need customization are the core denotations and the strings that describe peripheral concepts in the denotational distinctions. To show how the LKB of NS can be used in practice, I present Xenon, a natural language generation system that chooses the near-synonym that best matches a set of input preferences. I implemented Xenon by adding a near-synonym choice module and a near-synonym collocation module to an existing general-purpose surface realizer.

A revitalized version of the popular classic, the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Second Edition targets new and dynamic movements in the distribution, acquisition, and development of print and online media-compiling articles from more than 450 information specialists on topics including program planning in the digital era, recruitment, information management, advances in digital technology and encoding, intellectual property, and hardware, software, database selection and design, competitive intelligence, electronic records preservation, decision support systems, ethical issues in information, online library instruction, telecommuting, and digital library projects.