Grammars of natural languages can be expressed as mathematical objects, similar to computer programs. Such a formal presentation of grammars facilitates mathematical reasoning with grammars (and the languages they denote), as well as computational implementation of grammar processors. This book presents one of the most commonly used grammatical formalisms, Unification Grammars, which underlies contemporary linguistic theories such as Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The book provides a robust and rigorous exposition of the formalism that is both mathematically well-founded and linguistically motivated. While the material is presented formally, and much of the text is mathematically oriented, a core chapter of the book addresses linguistic applications and the implementation of several linguistic insights in unification grammars. Dozens of examples and numerous exercises (many with solutions) illustrate key points. Graduate students and researchers in both computer science and linguistics will find this book a valuable resource.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2004, held in Athens, Greece in October 2004. The 20 revised full papers and 8 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The topics of the papers presented range from theoretical results of learning algorithms to innovative applications of grammatical inference and from learning several interesting classes of formal grammars to estimations of probabilistic grammars.

The Sixth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI2002) was held in Amsterdam on September 23-25th, 2002. ICGI2002 was the sixth in a series of successful biennial international conferenceson the area of grammatical inference. Previous meetings were held in Essex, U.K.; Alicante, Spain; Mo- pellier, France; Ames, Iowa, USA; Lisbon, Portugal. This series of meetings seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of original research on all aspects of grammatical inference. Gr- matical inference, the process of inferring grammars from given data, is a ?eld that not only is challenging from a purely scienti?c standpoint but also ?nds many applications in real-world problems. Despite the fact that grammatical inference addresses problems in a re- tively narrow area, it uses techniques from many domains, and is positioned at the intersection of a number of di?erent disciplines. Researchers in grammatical inference come from ?elds as diverse as machine learning, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, pattern recognition, and arti?cial neural n- works. From a practical standpoint, applications in areas like natural language - quisition, computational biology, structural pattern recognition, information - trieval, text processing, data compression and adaptive intelligent agents have either been demonstrated or proposed in the literature. The technical program included the presentation of 23 accepted papers (out of 41 submitted). Moreover, for the ?rst time a software presentation was or- nized at ICGI. Short descriptions of the corresponding software are included in these proceedings, too.

Constraint-based linguistics is intersected by three fields: logic, linguistics, and computer sciences. The central theme that ties these different disciplines together is the notion of a linguistic formalism or metalanguage. This metalanguage has good mathematical properties, is designed to express descriptions of language, and has a semantics that can be implemented on a computer. Constraints, Language and Computation discusses the theory and practice of constraint-based computational linguistics. The book captures both the maturity of the field and some of its more interesting future prospects during a particulary important moment of development in this field.

The first edition of ELL (1993, Ron Asher, Editor) was hailed as "the field's standard reference work for a generation". Now the all-new second edition matches ELL's comprehensiveness and high quality, expanded for a new generation, while being the first encyclopedia to really exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics. * The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field * An entirely new work, with new editors, new authors, new topics and newly commissioned articles with a handful of classic articles * The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics through the online edition * Ground-breaking and International in scope and approach * Alphabetically arranged with extensive cross-referencing * Available in print and online, priced separately. The online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit www.info.sciencedirect.com. The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics Ground-breaking in scope - wider than any predecessor An invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in the fields of: linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition, language pathology, cognitive science, sociology, the law, the media, medicine & computer science. The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field

Reversible grammar allows computational models to be built that are equally well suited for the analysis and generation of natural language utterances. This task can be viewed from very different perspectives by theoretical and computational linguists, and computer scientists. The papers in this volume present a broad range of approaches to reversible, bi-directional, and non-directional grammar systems that have emerged in recent years. This is also the first collection entirely devoted to the problems of reversibility in natural language processing. Most papers collected in this volume are derived from presentations at a workshop held at the University of California at Berkeley in the summer of 1991 organised under the auspices of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This book will be a valuable reference to researchers in linguistics and computer science with interests in computational linguistics, natural language processing, and machine translation, as well as in practical aspects of computability.

Parsing, the syntactic analysis of language, has been studied extensively in computer science and computational linguistics. Computer programs and natural languages share an underlying theory of formal languages and require efficient parsing algorithms. This introduction reviews the theory of parsing from a novel perspective. It provides a formalism to capture the essential traits of a parser that abstracts from the fine detail and allows a uniform description and comparison of a variety of parsers, including Earley, Tomita, LR, Left-Corner, and Head-Corner parsers. The emphasis is on context-free phrase structure grammar and how these parsers can be extended to unification formalisms. The book combines mathematical rigor with high readability and is suitable as a graduate course text.