The goal of this Handbook is to describe the current assessment strategies and related best practices to professionals who serve individuals from diverse cultures or those who have difficulty using the English language. It will be a valuable resource for school psychologists, special educators, speech and hearing specialists, rehabilitation counselors, as well as graduate-level students of school psychology and child and family psychology.

The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in decision making. Human decision making has its li- tations in terms of information-processing capacity. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and tra?c management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with arti?cial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. We believe that close collaborations between humans and arti?cial systems will become essential and that the importance of research into Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (ICIS) is self-evident. Developments in information and communication technology have ra- cally changed our working environments. The vast amount of information available nowadays and the wirelessly networked nature of our modern so- ety open up new opportunities to handle di?cult decision-making situations such as computer-supported situation assessment and distributed decision making. To make good use of these new possibilities, we need to update our traditional views on the role and capabilities of information systems. The aim of the Interactive Collaborative Information Systems project is to develop techniques that support humans in complex information en- ronments and that facilitate distributed decision-making capabilities. ICIS emphasizes the importance of building actor-agent communities: close c- laborations between human and arti?cial actors that highlight their comp- mentary capabilities, and in which task distribution is ?exible and adaptive.

This book is aimed at providing an overview of several aspects of semantic role labeling. Chapter 1 begins with linguistic background on the definition of semantic roles and the controversies surrounding them. Chapter 2 describes how the theories have led to structured lexicons such as FrameNet, VerbNet and the PropBank Frame Files that in turn provide the basis for large scale semantic annotation of corpora. This data has facilitated the development of automatic semantic role labeling systems based on supervised machine learning techniques. Chapter 3 presents the general principles of applying both supervised and unsupervised machine learning to this task, with a description of the standard stages and feature choices, as well as giving details of several specific systems. Recent advances include the use of joint inference to take advantage of context sensitivities, and attempts to improve performance by closer integration of the syntactic parsing task with semantic role labeling. Chapter 3 also discusses the impact the granularity of the semantic roles has on system performance. Having outlined the basic approach with respect to English, Chapter 4 goes on to discuss applying the same techniques to other languages, using Chinese as the primary example. Although substantial training data is available for Chinese, this is not the case for many other languages, and techniques for projecting English role labels onto parallel corpora are also presented. Table of Contents: Preface / Semantic Roles / Available Lexical Resources / Machine Learning for Semantic Role Labeling / A Cross-Lingual Perspective / Summary

The international conference Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining IIS:IIPWM’05, organized in Gda?sk-Sobieszewo on 13–16th June, 2005, was a continuation of a long tradition of conferences on applications of Arti?cial Intelligence (AI) in Information Systems (IS), organized by the Institute of Computer Science of Polish Academy of Sciences in cooperation with other scienti?c and business institutions. The Institute itself is deeply engaged in research both in AI and IS and many scientists view it as a leading institution both in fundamental and - plied research in these areas in Poland. The originators of this conference series, Prof. M. D?browski and Dr. M. Michalewicz had in 1992 a long-term goal of bringing together scientists and industry of di?erent braches from Poland and abroad to achieve a creative synthesis. One can say that their dream has come to reality. Scientists from ?ve continents made their subm- sions to this conference. A brief look at the a?liations makes international cooperation visible. The research papers have either a motivation in c- crete applications or are o?-springs of some practical requests. This volume presents the best papers carefully chosen from a large set of submissions (about 45%). At this point we would like to express our thanks to the m- bers of Programme Committee for their excellent job. Also we are thankful to the organizers of the special sessions accompanying this conference: Jan Komorowski, Adam Przepiórkowski, Zbigniew W.