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

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

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.

Presents the discussion of the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new study findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a subfield in sociology/sociolinguistics, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding.
Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation natural language technologies for practical speech processing applications that serve the consumer s need for well-functioning natural language-driven personal assistants and other mobile devices, while also addressing business need for better functioning IVR-driven call centers that yield a more satisfying experience for the caller.
This anthology is aimed at two distinct audiences: one consisting of speech engineers and system developers; the other comprised of linguists and cognitive scientists. The text builds on the experience and knowledge of each of these audiences by exposing them to the work of the other.