This book provides an overview of a recent and flexible approach to speech synthesis design to develop the first statistical parametric speech synthesizer for Ibibio, a West African tonal language. The design precludes the inflexibility encountered when modeling tonal features of the language and can be used for other tonal African languages. Mobile use and technological innovations in developing African nations have exploded. With mobile technology, many of the barriers caused by infrastructure issues have vanished. In order to address issues that are unique to African tonal languages, the book uses Ibibio as a model. The text reviews the language's speech characteristics, required for building the front end components of the design and propose a finite state transducer (FST), useful for modelling the language’s tonetactics. The statistical parametric approach discussed in the text, implements the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique, with the goal of creating a generic structure that learns the model from the text itself, and uses the data-driven approach to input specification.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2017, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2017. The 26 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Language Resources, Tools and Evaluation, Less-Resourced-Languages, Speech Processing, Morphology, Computational Semantics, Machine Translation, and Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.

This is an exciting and innovative core textbook that focuses on the micro-level analysis of TM as a dynamic capability. Now in its second edition and fully updated throughout, it systematically addresses the major tools and techniques needed for businesses to successfully conduct TM activities. Arguing that there is no single best way to manage technology in a company and there is no mechanistic route to success, this accessible handbook provides a wealth of resources designed to increase the dynamic capability of an organisation. Written by a highly experienced team of authors from the Universities of Sabanci and Cambridge, Technology Management is the perfect companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students on a variety of business, management and engineering degree courses. It is also suitable for practitioners seeking to progress their professional development and industry knowledge.

The book presents selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, held on December 16–18, 2022, in Kitakyushu, Japan. It is divided into two volumes and discusses latest research outcomes in the field of Information Technology (IT) including but not limited to information hiding, multimedia signal processing, big data, data mining, bioinformatics, database, industrial and internet of things, and their applications.

To date, the relation between multilingualism and the Semantic Web has not yet received enough attention in the research community. One major challenge for the Semantic Web community is to develop architectures, frameworks and systems that can help in overcoming national and language barriers, facilitating equal access to information produced in different cultures and languages. As such, this volume aims at documenting the state-of-the-art with regard to the vision of a Multilingual Semantic Web, in which semantic information will be accessible in and across multiple languages. The Multilingual Semantic Web as envisioned in this volume will support the following functionalities: (1) responding to information needs in any language with regard to semantically structured data available on the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, (2) verbalizing and accessing semantically structured data, ontologies or other conceptualizations in multiple languages, (3) harmonizing, integrating, aggregating, comparing and repurposing semantically structured data across languages and (4) aligning and reconciling ontologies or other conceptualizations across languages. The volume is divided into three main sections: Principles, Methods and Applications. The section on “Principles” discusses models, architectures and methodologies that enrich the current Semantic Web architecture with features necessary to handle multiple languages. The section on “Methods” describes algorithms and approaches for solving key issues related to the construction of the Multilingual Semantic Web. The section on “Applications” describes the use of Multilingual Semantic Web based approaches in the context of several application domains. This volume is essential reading for all academic and industrial researchers who want to embark on this new research field at the intersection of various research topics, including the Semantic Web, Linked Data, natural language processing, computational linguistics, terminology and information retrieval. It will also be of great interest to practitioners who are interested in re-examining their existing infrastructure and methodologies for handling multiple languages in Web applications or information retrieval systems.

This book is a convergence of heterogeneous insights (from languages and literature, history, music, media and communications, computer science and information studies) which previously went their separate ways; now unified under a single framework for the purpose of preserving a unique heritage, the language. In a growing society like ours, description and documentation of human and scientific evidence/resources are improving. However, these resources have enjoyed cost-effective solutions for Western languages but are yet to flourish for African tone languages. By situating discussions around a universe of discourse, sufficient to engender cross-border interactions within the African context, this book shall break a dichotomy of challenges on adaptive processes required to unify resources to assist the development of modern solutions for the African domain.

With the increased use of technology in modern society, high volumes of multimedia information exists. It is important for businesses, organizations, and individuals to understand how to optimize this data and new methods are emerging for more efficient information management and retrieval. Information Retrieval and Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is an innovative reference source for the latest academic material in the field of information and communication technologies and explores how complex information systems interact with and affect one another. Highlighting a range of topics such as knowledge discovery, semantic web, and information resources management, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for researchers, developers, managers, strategic planners, and advanced-level students.

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

This book provides a broad overview of current work on South African languages, language resources and language technologies. While it provides a fairly comprehensive overview, it also ties together the most recent knowledge state here, and is therefore truly innovative ? The book is therefore informed by current international trends in the respective fields of science, and feeds back into them ? There is absolutely no doubt that the book has an academic peer audience and is directed at specialists in the field. - Prof. Axel Fleisch, University of Helsinki, Finland

An in-depth look at the changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. To date, there has been no published textbook which takes into account changing sociolinguistic dynamics that have influenced South African society. Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication breaks new ground in this arena. The scope of this book ranges from macro-sociolinguistic questions pertaining to language policies and their implementation (or non-implementation) to micro-sociolinguistic observations of actual language-use in verbal interaction, mainly in multilingual contexts of Higher Education (HE). There is a gradual move for the study of language and culture to be taught in the context of (professional) disciplines in which they would be used, for example, Journalism and African languages, Education and African languages, etc. The book caters for this growing market. Because of its multilingual nature, it caters to English and Afrikaans language speakers, as well as the Sotho and Nguni language groups _ the largest languages in South Africa [and also increasingly used in the context of South African Higher Education]. It brings together various inter-linked disciplines such as Sociolinguistics and Applied Language Studies, Media Studies and Journalism, History and Education, Social and Natural Sciences, Law, Human Language Technology, Music, Intercultural Communication and Literary Studies. The unique cross-cutting disciplinary features of the book will make it a must-have for twenty-first century South African students and scholars and those interested in applied language issues.