This book addresses the question: What can close discourse analysis contribute to the understanding of language? To do so, it presents a centering theory-based computational approach to discourse analysis concerning Chinese bei passive sentences, disposal ba constructions, ditransitive gei sentences, and locative fang sentences. The book first discusses the use of discourse analysis in the context of bei and ba constructions and then demonstrates how discourse analysis can contribute to the syntactic and semantic studies of these sentences. It also examines the various thematic roles differentiated in these four special sentence patterns, namely agent, recipient, theme/patient, and locative, and reveals the various degrees of discourse accessibility of these thematic roles. Exploring the correlation between centering theory and Chinese discourse, the book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in discourse analysis and Chinese special sentential structures, especially the formal approaches to these issues.

Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation of natural language technologies to resolve some of the most vexing natural-language problems that compromise the performance of speech systems today. This fourteen-chapter anthology consists of contributions from industry scientists and from academicians working at major universities in North America and Europe. They include researchers who have played a central role in DARPA-funded programs and developers who craft real-world solutions for corporations. This anthology is aimed at speech engineers, system developers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and others interested in utilizing natural-language technology in both spoken and text-based applications.

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism. Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a postsocialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity in—as well as its resistance to—the culture of global capitalism. Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has so far been confined—in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds—to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism. First published as a special issue of boundary 2, Postmodernism and China includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies. Contributors. Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang, Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, Xudong Zhang

Successful speaking and understanding requires mechanisms for reliably encoding structured linguistic representations in memory and for effectively accessing information in those representations later. Studying the time-course of real-time linguistic dependency formation provides a valuable tool for uncovering the cognitive and neural basis of these mechanisms. This volume draws together multiple perspectives on encoding and navigating structured linguistic representations, to highlight important empirical insights, and to identify key priorities for new research in this area.

Performance Art in China takes as its subject one of the most dynamic and controversial areas of experimental art practice in China. In his comprehensive study, Sydney-based theorist and art historian Thomas J. Berghuis introduces and investigates the idea of the "role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art," a notion grounded in the realization that the body is always present in art practice, as well as its subsequent, secondary representations. Through a series of in-depth case studies, Berghuis reveals how, during the past 25 years, Chinese performance artists have "acted out" their art, often in opposition to the principles governing correct behavior in the public domain. In addition to a 25-year chronology of events, a systematic index of places, names and key terms, as well as a bibliography and a glossary in English and Chinese, this study also offers the reader numerous previously unpublished photos and documents.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, held in February 2006. The 43 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 176 submissions. The papers are structured into two parts and organized in topical sections on computational linguistics research.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, IJCNLP 2004, held in Hainan Island, China in March 2004. The 84 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 211 papers submitted. The papers are organized in topical sections on dialogue and discourse; FSA and parsing algorithms; information extractions and question answering; information retrieval; lexical semantics, ontologies, and linguistic resources; machine translation and multilinguality; NLP software and applications, semantic disambiguities; statistical models and machine learning; taggers, chunkers, and shallow parsers; text and sentence generation; text mining; theories and formalisms for morphology, syntax, and semantics; word segmentation; NLP in mobile information retrieval and user interfaces; and text mining in bioinformatics.