Where Humans Meet Machines

Amy Neustein, Ph.D. is the Founder and CEO of Linguistic Technology Systems.

Judith Markowitz, Ph.D. is the President of J. Markowitz, Consultants.

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.

This book discusses the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding.

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

Preface.- Making the Case for an Open, Unified System Architecture in Response to Rapid Developments in the Natural Language Industry: Translingual Automatic Language Exploration System (TALES).- The Burgeoning of Medical Social-Media Postings and the Need for Improved Natural Language Mapping Tools.- Machine Translation: the Enterprise Point of View.- Speech-Enabled Unified Communications: Overcoming the Multilingual Challenges of the European Market.- Exploiting Lexical Sensitivity in Performing Word-Sense Disambiguation.- Summarizing Short Texts through a Discourse-Centered Approach in a Multilingual Context.- Handling Two Difficult Challenges for Text-to-Speech Synthesis Systems: Out-of-Vocabulary Words and Prosody -- A Case Study in Romanian.- MAP: An Abstraction-Based Metaphor Analysis Program for Overcoming Cross-Modal Challenges.- Translation of Idiomatic Expressions across Different Languages: A Study of the Effectiveness of TransSearch.- Argumentation-Based Dialog Systems for Medical Training.- Design of Dialog-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Simulate Human-to-Human Tutoring.- TCAD: Vocabulary Acquisition Tool for Motivating Bilingual Pupils with Hearing Impairments in Learning English.- A Hybrid Approach to Automated Rating of Foreign Language Proficiency Using Oral Test Responses.- Multilingual Systems, Translation Technology and Their Impact on the Translator's Profession.- Editors' biographies.