Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material gathered here is perfect for anyone who needs a detailed and accessible introduction to the important semantic theories. Designed for a wide audience, it will be of great value to linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language. The book covers theories of lexical semantics, cognitively oriented approaches to semantics, compositional theories of sentence semantics, and discourse semantics. This clear, elegant explanation of the key theories in semantics research is essential reading for anyone working in the area.

The interrelated topics of discourse representation and text processing are amongst the most important in psycholinguistic research, and have generated a vast literature. This collection is not intended as an overview of this work, rather it focuses on some of the central issues that arise out of the mental models theory of text comprehension. According to this theory, the content of discourse is represented in mental models of parts of the real or an imaginary world, and these models are constructed incrementally as texts are processed. Mental models theory emphasises the role of anaphoric expressions, such as definite pronouns, in linking the information in different parts of the text and, more generally, the role of inferences in constructing mental models. It also recognises the importance of formal linguistic processes, such as semantic combination, in computing the information in the current clause that is to be added into the model. The papers in this volume reflect these aspects of mental models theory. They cover the understanding of noun-noun combinations, the interpretation of pronouns, and inference making. Throughout, the emphasis is on the flexibility of the language processing system and its extensive, and often extremely rapid, use of knowledge about the world. International interest in mental models theory is reflected in contributions from the United States, the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, where there is a rapidly growing interest in experimental psycholinguistics in general and mental models theory in particular. Language and Cognitive Processes is an international journal which publishes theoretical and experimental research into the mental processes and representations involved in language use. The psychological study of language has attracted increasing interest over the past three decades, and Language and Cognitive Processes provides a common focus for this enterprise. It is a journal which emphasises the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language. Apart from research in experimental and developmental psychology, Language and Cognitive Processes publishes work derived from linguistics, philosophy, computer science and Artificial Intelligence.

Discourse Processing here is framed as marking up a text with structural descriptions on several levels, which can serve to support many language-processing or text-mining tasks. We first explore some ways of assigning structure on the document level: the logical document structure as determined by the layout of the text, its genre-specific content structure, and its breakdown into topical segments. Then the focus moves to phenomena of local coherence. We introduce the problem of coreference and look at methods for building chains of coreferring entities in the text. Next, the notion of coherence relation is introduced as the second important factor of local coherence. We study the role of connectives and other means of signaling such relations in text, and then return to the level of larger textual units, where tree or graph structures can be ascribed by recursively assigning coherence relations. Taken together, these descriptions can inform text summarization, information extraction, discourse-aware sentiment analysis, question answering, and the like. Table of Contents: Introduction / Large Discourse Units and Topics / Coreference Resolution / Small Discourse Units and Coherence Relations / Summary: Text Structure on Multiple Interacting Levels

The interrelated topics of discourse representation and text processing between them comprise a substantial part of comtemporary psycholinguistics, not to mention the related disciplines in which they are studied. The papers that follow are by no means intended to give an overview of this cast research field. Rather, they present some of the most recent research on selected problems within it. Our own prediction is to study discourse representation and text processing from the perspective of mental models theory (Garnham, 1987; Johnson-Laird, 1983). The mental models theory.

This book brings together linguistics and psycholinguistics. Text representation is considered a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding. The focus is on referential and relational coherence and the role of linguistic characteristics as processing instructions from a text linguistic and discourse psychology point of view. Consequently, this book presents various research methodologies: linguistic analysis, text analysis, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, argumentation analysis, and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text processing. The authors compare, test, and evaluate linguistic and processing theories of text representation. A state of the art volume in an emerging field of interest, located at the very heart of our communicative behavior: the study of text and text representation.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the intersection of fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, and Cognitive Psychology. This book presents in four chapters the state of the art and fundamental concepts of key NLP areas. Are presented in the first chapter the fundamental concepts in lexical semantics, lexical databases, knowledge representation paradigms, and ontologies. The second chapter is about combinatorial and formal semantics. Discourse and text representation as well as automatic discourse segmentation and interpretation, and anaphora resolution are the subject of the third chapter. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I will cover some aspects of large scale applications of NLP such as software architecture and their relations to cognitive models of NLP as well as the evaluation paradigms of NLP software. Furthermore, I will present in this chapter the main NLP applications such as Machine Translation (MT), Information Retrieval (IR), as well as Big Data and Information Extraction such as event extraction, sentiment analysis and opinion mining.