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 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.

This open access book provides an overview of the recent advances in representation learning theory, algorithms and applications for natural language processing (NLP). It is divided into three parts. Part I presents the representation learning techniques for multiple language entries, including words, phrases, sentences and documents. Part II then introduces the representation techniques for those objects that are closely related to NLP, including entity-based world knowledge, sememe-based linguistic knowledge, networks, and cross-modal entries. Lastly, Part III provides open resource tools for representation learning techniques, and discusses the remaining challenges and future research directions. The theories and algorithms of representation learning presented can also benefit other related domains such as machine learning, social network analysis, semantic Web, information retrieval, data mining and computational biology. This book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, researchers, lecturers, and industrial engineers, as well as anyone interested in representation learning and natural language processing.