Challenges in Natural Language Processing
Studies in Natural Language Processing Series

Although natural language processing has come far, the technology has not achieved a major impact on society. Is this because of some fundamental limitation that cannot be overcome? Or because there has not been enough time to refine and apply theoretical work already done? Editors Madeleine Bates and Ralph Weischedel believe it is neither; they feel that several critical issues have never been adequately addressed in either theoretical or applied work, and they have invited capable researchers in the field to do that in Challenges in Natural Language Processing. This volume will be of interest to researchers of computational linguistics in academic and non-academic settings and to graduate students in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and linguistics.

Preface; Symposium participants; Part I. Challenging Problems: 1. Critical changes for natural language processing Madeleine Bates, Robert J. Bobrow and Ralph M. Weischedel; Part II. Building a Lexicon: 2. The contribution of lexicography B. T. Sue Atkins; 3. The contribution of linguistics Beth Levin; 4. The contribution of computational lexicology Branimar K. Boguraev; Part III. Semantics and Knowledge Representation: 5. Events, situations and adverbs Robert C. Moore; 6. Natural language, knowledge representation and logical form James F. Allen; Part IV. Discourse: 7. Getting and keeping the center of attention Rebecca J. Passonneau; 8. Surface structure, intonation and discourse meaning Mark Steedman; Part V. Spoken Language Systems: 9. Prosody, intonation and speech technology Janet Pierrehumbert; Part VI. Conclusion: 10. The future of computational linguistics Madeleine Bates and Ralph M. Weischedel; Author index; Subject index.