This book provides an overview of a recent and flexible approach to speech synthesis design to develop the first statistical parametric speech synthesizer for Ibibio, a West African tonal language. The design precludes the inflexibility encountered when modeling tonal features of the language and can be used for other tonal African languages. Mobile use and technological innovations in developing African nations have exploded. With mobile technology, many of the barriers caused by infrastructure issues have vanished. In order to address issues that are unique to African tonal languages, the book uses Ibibio as a model. The text reviews the language's speech characteristics, required for building the front end components of the design and propose a finite state transducer (FST), useful for modelling the language’s tonetactics. The statistical parametric approach discussed in the text, implements the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique, with the goal of creating a generic structure that learns the model from the text itself, and uses the data-driven approach to input specification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2017, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2017. The 26 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Language Resources, Tools and Evaluation, Less-Resourced-Languages, Speech Processing, Morphology, Computational Semantics, Machine Translation, and Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.

The book presents selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, held on December 16–18, 2022, in Kitakyushu, Japan. It is divided into two volumes and discusses latest research outcomes in the field of Information Technology (IT) including but not limited to information hiding, multimedia signal processing, big data, data mining, bioinformatics, database, industrial and internet of things, and their applications.

To date, the relation between multilingualism and the Semantic Web has not yet received enough attention in the research community. One major challenge for the Semantic Web community is to develop architectures, frameworks and systems that can help in overcoming national and language barriers, facilitating equal access to information produced in different cultures and languages. As such, this volume aims at documenting the state-of-the-art with regard to the vision of a Multilingual Semantic Web, in which semantic information will be accessible in and across multiple languages. The Multilingual Semantic Web as envisioned in this volume will support the following functionalities: (1) responding to information needs in any language with regard to semantically structured data available on the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, (2) verbalizing and accessing semantically structured data, ontologies or other conceptualizations in multiple languages, (3) harmonizing, integrating, aggregating, comparing and repurposing semantically structured data across languages and (4) aligning and reconciling ontologies or other conceptualizations across languages. The volume is divided into three main sections: Principles, Methods and Applications. The section on “Principles” discusses models, architectures and methodologies that enrich the current Semantic Web architecture with features necessary to handle multiple languages. The section on “Methods” describes algorithms and approaches for solving key issues related to the construction of the Multilingual Semantic Web. The section on “Applications” describes the use of Multilingual Semantic Web based approaches in the context of several application domains. This volume is essential reading for all academic and industrial researchers who want to embark on this new research field at the intersection of various research topics, including the Semantic Web, Linked Data, natural language processing, computational linguistics, terminology and information retrieval. It will also be of great interest to practitioners who are interested in re-examining their existing infrastructure and methodologies for handling multiple languages in Web applications or information retrieval systems.

This book is a convergence of heterogeneous insights (from languages and literature, history, music, media and communications, computer science and information studies) which previously went their separate ways; now unified under a single framework for the purpose of preserving a unique heritage, the language. In a growing society like ours, description and documentation of human and scientific evidence/resources are improving. However, these resources have enjoyed cost-effective solutions for Western languages but are yet to flourish for African tone languages. By situating discussions around a universe of discourse, sufficient to engender cross-border interactions within the African context, this book shall break a dichotomy of challenges on adaptive processes required to unify resources to assist the development of modern solutions for the African domain.

With the increased use of technology in modern society, high volumes of multimedia information exists. It is important for businesses, organizations, and individuals to understand how to optimize this data and new methods are emerging for more efficient information management and retrieval. Information Retrieval and Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is an innovative reference source for the latest academic material in the field of information and communication technologies and explores how complex information systems interact with and affect one another. Highlighting a range of topics such as knowledge discovery, semantic web, and information resources management, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for researchers, developers, managers, strategic planners, and advanced-level students.

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.