As a relatively young field of research and development started by work on cryptanalysis and machine translation around 50 years ago, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is concerned with the automated processing of human language. It addresses the analysis and generation of written and spoken language, though speech processing is often regarded as a separate subfield. NLP emphasizes processing a...

This paper reports on a course whose aim is to introduce Formal Language Theory to students with little formal background (mostly linguistics students). The course was first taught at the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information to a mixed audience of students, undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate, with various backgrounds. The challenges of teaching such a course include ...

We present a formal description of a logical language that is based on a propositional semantic network. Variables in this language are not atomic and have potentially complex structure. We start from the individual components of a semantic network system, atomic nodes and relations that connect nodes, and provide a complete speci cation for the structure of nodes and a subsumption procedure be...

How we teach and learn is undergoing a revolution, due to changes in technology and connectivity. Education may be one of the best application areas for advanced NLP techniques, and NLP researchers have much to contribute to this problem, especially in the areas of learning to write, mastery learning, and peer learning. In this paper I consider what happens when we convert natural language proc...

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in research on empirical methods in natural language processing. These methods employ learning techniques to automatically extract linguistic knowledge from natural language corpora rather than require the system developer to manually encode the requisite knowledge. The current special issue reviews recent research in empirical methods in speech reco...

Natural Language Processing holds great promise for making computer interfaces that are easier to use for people, since people will (hopefully) be able to talk to the computer in their own language, rather than learn a specialized language of computer commands. For programming, however, the necessity of a formal programming language for communicating with a computer has always been taken for gr...

One of the most recent developments in NLP is the emergence of linguistic annotation metasystems which make use of existing processing tools and implement pipelined architecture. In this paper we describe a system that offers a new perspective in exploiting NLP meta-systems by providing a common processing framework. This framework supports most of common NLP tasks by chaining tools that are ab...