Product Description: What will it be like to admit Artificial Companions into our society? How will they change our relations with each other? How important will they be in the emotional and practical lives of their owners – since we know that people became emotionally dependent even on simple devices like the Tamagotchi? How much social life might they have in contacting each other? The contributors to this book discuss the possibility and desirability of some form of long-term computer Companions now being a certainty in the coming years...read more

Product Description: As a pioneer in computational linguistics, working in the earliest days of language processing by computer, Margaret Masterman believed that meaning, not grammar, was the key to understanding languages, and that machines could determine the meaning of sentences...read more

Product Description: A history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the field is the subject of this book. It details the deep differences between rival groups on how best to do MT, and presents a global perspective covering historical and contemporary systems in Europe, the US and Japan...read more

Product Description: Machine Conversationsis a collection of some of the best research available in the practical arts of machine conversation. The book describes various attempts to create practical and flexible machine conversation - ways of talking to computers in an unrestricted version of English or some other language...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Accompanying continued industrial production and sales of artificial intelligence and expert systems is the risk that difficult and resistant theoretical problems and issues will be ignored. The participants at the Third Tinlap Workshop, whose contributions are contained in Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, remove that risk. They discuss and promote theoretical research on natural language processing, examinations of solutions to current problems, development of new theories, and representations of published literature on the subject. Discussions among these theoreticians in artificial intelligence, logic, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics draw a comprehensive, up-to-date picture of the natural language processing field.