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.

Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems 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. Some of the most vexing natural-language problems that are addressed in this book entail   recognizing and processing idiomatic expressions, understanding metaphors, matching an anaphor correctly with its antecedent, performing word-sense disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary words and phrases. 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. These contributing authors analyze the role of natural language technology in the global marketplace; they explore the need for natural language mapping-tools that can cull important data from the vast array of social-media postings; they describe innovative Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and applications; and they offer NLP tools for physicians, educators, and translators.  Their contributions constitute diverse and multifaceted solutions for the knotty natural-language problems that permeate everyday human communications. Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems is designed for speech engineers, system developers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and others interested in utilizing natural-language technology in both spoken and text-based applications.