Seeking to develop the first satisfying universal definition of basic grammatical units of the major syntactic categories such as "noun," "verb," and "adjective" and of the principal grammatical relations, "subject," "object," and "oblique," William Croft employs the methods of cross-linguistic or typological analysis and cognitive linguistics. Drawing evidence from a wide variety of languages,...

In a career spanning five decades, Patrick Suppes has pursued a unique approach to the problems of language and learning. This book, with Colleen Crangle, is a reprise of much of the work on the philosophy of language. As the title indicates, the underlying model is of a robot that is to receive instructions (and later also instruction) in ordinary language. The philosophizing is made concrete ...

This book is a diverse collection of ten presentations given at an International Summer School on Information Extraction in Rome, 1997. The goal of information extraction (IE) is selective, task-driven interpretation of text narrative in order to fill out templates with information about a particular scenario. I was disappointed to find that only five of the articles were actually about IE rese...

This book describes Word Manager (WM), a lexical database system intended to serve a wide range of NLP applications. The most striking aspect of WM itself, and of this presentation, is its windowed user interface. The book consists of five chapters ('Introduction,' 'The Word Manager Approach,' 'Inflection,' 'Wordformation' [sic], and 'Linguistic Theories') and a lengthy appendix giving syntax d...

Corpora are frequently used to investigate authentic language use and a variety of largesample statistical procedures are currently employed and developed for this purpose. This book provides a largely comprehensive and succinct overview of the most commonly employed statistical procedures with their mathematical foundations and is thus useful for people interested in gaining a deeper understan...

Examples play a crucial role in instruction manuals, textbooks, and documentation. If they are carefully chosen they can show clearly how a new facility or language can be used, while also supporting conceptual understanding. To be effective, examples should be linked with any textual explanation of a topic, complementing that description. Language generation techniques have been used in severa...

Verbmobil is a project sponsored by the German government, whose aim is to develop a translation system for face-to-face speech dialogue. This book is the report on a preliminary study of the project conducted by CSLI, Stanford University. The contents of the book are as follows: Chapter 1 contains introductory material; Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are devoted to describing the current state-of-the...

Referential Communication Tasks offers, in a small format (125 pages), a general survey of experimental settings and scientific background on communication studies centered on specific activities in which the speakers are observed for their ability to achieve tasks rather than solely for their linguistic productions. It thus offers a basic and introductory insight to research and experiments th...