This book presents a unique opportunity for constructing a consistent image of collaborative manual annotation for Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP has witnessed two major evolutions in the past 25 years: firstly, the extraordinary success of machine learning, which is now, for better or for worse, overwhelmingly dominant in the field, and secondly, the multiplication of evaluation campaigns or shared tasks. Both involve manually annotated corpora, for the training and evaluation of the systems. These corpora have progressively become the hidden pillars of our domain, providing food for our hungry machine learning algorithms and reference for evaluation. Annotation is now the place where linguistics hides in NLP. However, manual annotation has largely been ignored for some time, and it has taken a while even for annotation guidelines to be recognized as essential. Although some efforts have been made lately to address some of the issues presented by manual annotation, there has still been little research done on the subject. This book aims to provide some useful insights into the subject. Manual corpus annotation is now at the heart of NLP, and is still largely unexplored. There is a need for manual annotation engineering (in the sense of a precisely formalized process), and this book aims to provide a first step towards a holistic methodology, with a global view on annotation.

The paradigm of Graph Rewriting is used very little in the field of Natural Language Processing. But graphs are a natural way of representing the deep syntax and the semantics of natural languages. Deep syntax is an abstraction of syntactic dependencies towards semantics in the form of graphs and there is a compact way of representing the semantics in an underspecified logical framework also with graphs. Then, Graph Rewriting reconciles efficiency with linguistic readability for producing representations at some linguistic level by transformation of a neighbor level: from raw text to surface syntax, from surface syntax to deep syntax, from deep syntax to underspecified logical semantics and conversely.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the intersection of fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, and Cognitive Psychology. This book presents in four chapters the state of the art and fundamental concepts of key NLP areas. Are presented in the first chapter the fundamental concepts in lexical semantics, lexical databases, knowledge representation paradigms, and ontologies. The second chapter is about combinatorial and formal semantics. Discourse and text representation as well as automatic discourse segmentation and interpretation, and anaphora resolution are the subject of the third chapter. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I will cover some aspects of large scale applications of NLP such as software architecture and their relations to cognitive models of NLP as well as the evaluation paradigms of NLP software. Furthermore, I will present in this chapter the main NLP applications such as Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR), as well as Big Data and Information Extraction such as event extraction, sentiment analysis and opinion mining.

This volume explores the opportunities afforded by the construction and evaluation of multilayer corpora, an emerging methodology within corpus linguistics that brings about multiple independent parallel analyses of the same linguistic phenomena, and how the interplay of these concurrent analyses can help to push the field into new frontiers. The first part of the book surveys the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of multilayer corpus work, including an exploration of various technical and data collection issues. The second part builds on the groundwork of the first half to show multilayer corpora applied to different subfields of linguistic study, including information structure research, referentiality, discourse models, and functional theories of discourse analysis, synthesizing these different discussions in a detailed case study of non-standard language in its concluding chapter. Advancing the multilayer corpus linguistic research paradigm into new and different directions, this volume is an indispensable resource for graduate students and researchers in corpus linguistics, syntax, semantics, construction studies, and cognitive grammar.

Like every other walk of modern life, the law has embraced digital technology, and is increasingly reliant on information systems for its efficient functioning. This book presents papers from the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2017), held in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, in December 2017. In the three decades since they began, the JURIX conferences have been held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, and have become a fully European conference series which addresses familiar topics and extends known techniques, as well as exploring newer topics such as question answering and the use of data mining and machine learning. Of the 42 submissions received for this edition, 12 have been selected for publication as full papers and 13 as short papers, with an acceptance rate of around 59%. The papers address a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence and law, such as argumentation, norms, evidence, belief revision, citations, case-based reasoning and ontologies. Diverse techniques such as information retrieval and extraction, machine learning, semantic web, and network analysis were applied, among others, and textual sources include legal cases, bar examinations, and legislative/regulatory documents. The book will be of interest to all those working in the legal system who wish to keep abreast of the latest developments in information systems.

Traditionally concerned with computational models of legal reasoning and the analysis of legal data, the field of legal knowledge and information systems has seen increasing interest in the application of data analytics and machine learning tools to legal tasks in recent years. This book presents the proceedings of the 34th annual JURIX conference, which, due to pandemic restrictions, was hosted online in a virtual format from 8 – 10 December 2021 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Since its inception as a mainly Dutch event, the JURIX conference has become truly international and now, as a platform for the exchange of knowledge between theoretical research and applications, attracts academics, legal practitioners, software companies, governmental agencies and judiciary from around the world. A total of 65 submissions were received for this edition, and after rigorous review, 30 of these were selected for publication as long papers or short papers, representing an overall acceptance rate of 46 %. The papers are divided into 6 sections: Visualization and Legal Informatics; Knowledge Representation and Data Analytics; Logical and Conceptual Representations; Predictive Models; Explainable Artificial Intelligence; and Legal Ethics, and cover a wide range of topics, from computational models of legal argumentation, case-based reasoning, legal ontologies, smart contracts, privacy management and evidential reasoning, through information extraction from different types of text in legal documents, to ethical dilemmas. Providing an overview of recent advances and the cross-fertilization between law and computing technologies, this book will be of interest to all those working at the interface between technology and law.

Reformulation and Acquisition of Linguistic Complexity proposes a new answer to the question of the appropriation or acquisition of a mother tongue – a complex object, one that is both stable and perpetually evolving. This answer is based on the reformulating principle that children spontaneously apply; a principle that is illustrated here with children retelling the same story. These children are all 6, 8 or 10 years old and speak French, Italian, Croatian or Polish as a first language. This book demonstrates that the acquisition of any mother tongue is explained by the application of various reformulation procedures between source predications and reformulated predications. These procedures are comparable from one language to another, and different from one age group to another. This book also studies certain complex phenomena at the lexical and syntactical levels, and analyzes how children, depending on their age, treat these phenomena. Finally, we show that the acquisition of a mother tongue is a fundamentally linguistic activity.