The workshop series on Text, Speech and Dialogue originated in 1998 with the ?rst TSD1998 held in Brno, Czech Republic. This year’s TSD2000, already the third in the series, returns to Brno and to its organizers from the Faculty of Informatics at the Masaryk University. As shown by the ever growing interest in TSD series, this annual workshop developed into the prime meeting of speech and language researchers from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, which provides a unique opportunity to get acquainted with the current activities in all aspects of language communication and to witness the amazing vitality of researchers from the former East Block countries. Thanks need to be extended to all who continue to make the TSD workshop series such a success: ?rst, to the authors themselves, without whom TSD2000 would not exist; next, to all organizations that support TSD2000, among them the International Speech Communication Association, the Faculty of Informatics at the Masaryk University in Brno and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, West Bohemia University in Plzen; ? and last but not least,to the organizers and members of the Program Committee who spentmuch effort to make TSD2000 success and who reviewed 131 contributions submitted from all corners of the world and accepted 75 out of them for presentation at the workshop. This book is evidence of the success of all involved.

Volume 19 of Group III (Crystal and Solid State Physics) deals with the magnetic properties of metals, alloys and metallic compounds. The amount of information available in this field is so substantial that several subvolumes are needed to cover it all. The first subvolumes treat the intrinsic magnetic properties, i. e. those magnetic properties which depend only on the chemical composition and the crystal structure. So far, subvolumes III/19a, III/19b and III/19c have appeared. Data on the properties that depend on the preparation of the samples measured, as for instance, thin films or amorphous alloys and the magnetic alloys used in technical applications, are being compiled in the last subvolumes of III/19. In the first of these, subvolume III/19g, magnetic properties are given for several major types of crystalline and amorphous thin magnetic films that are supported by a substrate and for which a more or less coherent group of data is available. The properties of sputtered metallic amorphous films containing 3d transition elements will be dealt with in the following subvolume.

The central task of future-oriented computational linguistics is the development of cognitive machines which humans can freely speak to in their natural language. This will involve the development of a functional theory of language, an objective method of verification, and a wide range of practical applications. Natural communication requires not only verbal processing, but also non-verbal perception and action. Therefore, the content of this book is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots with a focus on the mechanics of natural language communication in both the listener and the speaker.

This book treats the problem of formulating models in mathematical programming, and thereafter solving the resulting model. Particular emphasis is placed on the interaction between the two. The topic is viewed from different angles, namely linear programming (Walter Murray), integer programming (Ellis Johnson), network flows (John Mulvey), and stochastic programming (Roger J-B Wets). The book will be very useful for any mathematics programmer or operations researcher who works in the field of real-world modelling. The book is an important part of any university course in modelling, particularly in operations research, economics and business. The book also contains an article on the origins of mathematical programming (Alexander Rinnooy Kan). This is important reading for anyone interested in the history of the field.

With the proliferation of computer languages and dialects, it is important to create tools to aid in the construction of source-to-source translators. By allowing users to make use of software (or data) written for another system, these tools form an important component in the quest for software reusability. After discussing the theoretical and practical issues of attribute grammar inversion, this book demonstrates how the technique can be used to build source-to-source translators. This is done by first identifying a common canonical form in which to represent the various source languages and then writing attribute grammars from each source to the canonical form. By automatically inverting these attribute grammars one obtains translators from the canonical form back to each source language and by composing the appropriate pairs of translators one obtains source-to-source translators. To prove the feasibility of the inversion approach to source-to-source translation, it has been used to generate translators between the programming languages Pascal and C.

The central task of a future-oriented computational linguistics is the development of cognitive machines which humans can freely talk with in their respective natural language. In the long run, this task will ensure the development of a functional theory of language, an objective method of verification, and a wide range of practical applications. Natural communication requires not only verbal processing, but also non-verbal perception and action. Therefore the content of this textbook is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots. The main topic is the mechanism of natural language communication in both the speaker and the hearer. The content is divided into four parts: Theory of Language, Theory of Grammar, Morphology and Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. The book contains more than 700 exercises for reviewing key ideas and important problems. In the Second Edition, changes are most noticeable in Chapters 22-24, which have been completely rewritten. They present a declarative outline for programming the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of natural language communication. The presentation is now simpler and more comprehensive. It is defined as a formal fragment and includes a new control structure, an analysis of spatio-temporal infer-encing, and an analysis of internal matching based on the notion of a task analysis. Examples and explanations which were contained in the old versions of Chapters 22-24 have been moved to the new Appendix. A schematic summary and a conclusion have been added as well.

The practical task of building a talking robot requires a theory of how natural language communication works. Conversely, the best way to computationally verify a theory of natural language communication is to demonstrate its functioning concretely in the form of a talking robot, the epitome of human–machine communication. To build an actual robot requires hardware that provides appropriate recognition and action interfaces, and because such hardware is hard to develop the approach in this book is theoretical: the author presents an artificial cognitive agent with language as a software system called database semantics (DBS). Because a theoretical approach does not have to deal with the technical difficulties of hardware engineering there is no reason to simplify the system – instead the software components of DBS aim at completeness of function and of data coverage in word form recognition, syntactic–semantic interpretation and inferencing, leaving the procedural implementation of elementary concepts for later. In this book the author first examines the universals of natural language and explains the Database Semantics approach. Then in Part I he examines the following natural language communication issues: using external surfaces; the cycle of natural language communication; memory structure; autonomous control; and learning. In Part II he analyzes the coding of content according to the aspects: semantic relations of structure; simultaneous amalgamation of content; graph-theoretical considerations; computing perspective in dialogue; and computing perspective in text. The book ends with a concluding chapter, a bibliography and an index. The book will be of value to researchers, graduate students and engineers in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, in particular those who deal with natural language processing.

Modern science is divided into three parts: natural sciences, engineering sciences and humanities. Over the last millennia, natural and engineering sciences evolved a symbiotic relationship, but humanities still stand apart. Today, however, designing and building a talking robot is a comparatively new challenge for which all three branches are needed. Starting from the idea that designing a theory of computational cognition should be as complete as possible, and trying to answer questions such as “Which ontology is required for building a computational cognition?”, the current book integrates interfaces, components, functional flows, data structure, database schema, and algorithms into a coherent system with an extensive range of cognitive functions, and constitutes the background to the book “Ontology of Communication” recently published by the author (Springer, 2023). Part I discusses ontological distinctions between a sign-based and an agent-based approach, and continues with explanations of the data structure, the content-addressable database schema; the time-linear derivations of the speak and the hear mode; resonating content; induction, deduction, and abduction in inferencing, and concludes with a reconstruction of eight classical syllogisms as a test suite for DBS inferencing in the think mode. Part II complements the literal use of language in the speak and hear mode with a reconstruction of syntactic mood adaptations and figurative use. The database schema of DBS is shown to lend itself not only to the tasks of traditional storage and retrieval, but also of reference, coreference, shadowing, coactivation of resonating content, and selective activation. Part III complements the treatment of individual topics in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive psychology with an overall software structure in the form of three interacting main components, called the interface, the memory, and the production component.