Where Humans Meet Machines

Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems brings humans and machines closer together by showing how linguistic complexities that confound the speech systems of today can be handled effectively by sophisticated natural-language technology. Some of the most vexing natural-language problems that are addressed in this book entail recognizing and processing idiomatic expressions, understanding metaphors, matching an anaphor correctly with its antecedent, performing word-sense disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary words and phrases. 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. These contributing authors analyze the role of natural language technology in the global marketplace; they explore the need for natural language mapping-tools that can cull important data from the vast array of social-media postings; they describe innovative Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and applications; and they offer NLP tools for physicians, educators, and translators. Their contributions constitute diverse and multifaceted solutions for the knotty natural-language problems that permeate everyday human communications. Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems is designed for speech engineers, system developers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and others interested in utilizing natural-language technology in both spoken and text-based applications.