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Learning to rank refers to machine learning techniques for training a model in a ranking task. Learning to rank is useful for many applications in information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining. Intensive studies have been conducted on its problems recently, and significant progress has been made. This lecture gives an introduction to the area including the fundamental problems, major approaches, theories, applications, and future work. The author begins by showing that various ranking problems in information retrieval and natural language processing can be formalized as two basic ranking tasks, namely ranking creation (or simply ranking) and ranking aggregation. In rank...
Thanks to the availability of texts on the Web in recent years, increased knowledge and information have been made available to broader audiences. However, the way in which a text is written—its vocabulary, its syntax—can be difficult to read and understand for many people, especially those with poor literacy, cognitive or linguistic impairment, or those with limited knowledge of the language of the text. Texts containing uncommon words or long and complicated sentences can be difficult to read and understand by people as well as difficult to analyze by machines. Automatic text simplification is the process of transforming a text into another text which, ideally conveying the same messag...
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Conversational AI. While the idea of interacting with a computer using voice or text goes back a long way, it is only in recent years that this idea has become a reality with the emergence of digital personal assistants, smart speakers, and chatbots. Advances in AI, particularly in deep learning, along with the availability of massive computing power and vast amounts of data, have led to a new generation of dialogue systems and conversational interfaces. Current research in Conversational AI focuses mainly on the application of machine learning and statistical data-driven approaches to the development of dialogue systems. However, it is impo...
Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of reasoning that appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some o...
Text production has many applications. It is used, for instance, to generate dialogue turns from dialogue moves, verbalise the content of knowledge bases, or generate English sentences from rich linguistic representations, such as dependency trees or abstract meaning representations. Text production is also at work in text-to-text transformations such as sentence compression, sentence fusion, paraphrasing, sentence (or text) simplification, and text summarisation. This book offers an overview of the fundamentals of neural models for text production. In particular, we elaborate on three main aspects of neural approaches to text production: how sequential decoders learn to generate adequate te...
Many applications within natural language processing involve performing text-to-text transformations, i.e., given a text in natural language as input, systems are required to produce a version of this text (e.g., a translation), also in natural language, as output. Automatically evaluating the output of such systems is an important component in developing text-to-text applications. Two approaches have been proposed for this problem: (i) to compare the system outputs against one or more reference outputs using string matching-based evaluation metrics and (ii) to build models based on human feedback to predict the quality of system outputs without reference texts. Despite their popularity, ref...
This unique book provides a comprehensive introduction to the most popular syntax-based statistical machine translation models, filling a gap in the current literature for researchers and developers in human language technologies. While phrase-based models have previously dominated the field, syntax-based approaches have proved a popular alternative, as they elegantly solve many of the shortcomings of phrase-based models. The heart of this book is a detailed introduction to decoding for syntax-based models. The book begins with an overview of synchronous-context free grammar (SCFG) and synchronous tree-substitution grammar (STSG) along with their associated statistical models. It also descri...
The attempt to spot deception through its correlates in human behavior has a long history. Until recently, these efforts have concentrated on identifying individual "cues" that might occur with deception. However, with the advent of computational means to analyze language and other human behavior, we now have the ability to determine whether there are consistent clusters of differences in behavior that might be associated with a false statement as opposed to a true one. While its focus is on verbal behavior, this book describes a range of behaviors—physiological, gestural as well as verbal—that have been proposed as indicators of deception. An overview of the primary psychological and co...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2008, held in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, in June 2008. The 51 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks and 25 system description papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 270 submitted papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents, application ontologies, applications, formal languages, foundational issues, learning, ontologies and natural language, ontology alignment, query processing, search, semantic Web services, storage and retrieval of semantic Web data, as well as user interfaces and personalization.
This two-volume set, consisting of LNCS 7816 and LNCS 7817, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Linguistics and Intelligent Processing, CICLING 2013, held on Samos, Greece, in March 2013. The total of 91 contributions presented was carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections named: general techniques; lexical resources; morphology and tokenization; syntax and named entity recognition; word sense disambiguation and coreference resolution; semantics and discourse; sentiment, polarity, subjectivity, and opinion; machine translation and multilingualism; text mining, information extraction, and information retrieval; text summarization; stylometry and text simplification; and applications.