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.

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.

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.