There is an overwhelming amount of language data on the Internet that needs to be searched, categorized, or processed—making the role of linguistics in the design of information systems a critical one. This book is a guide for linguists hoping to enter the language-processing field, as it assembles distinguished computational linguists from academia, research centers, and business to discuss how linguists can solve practical problems and improve business efficiency. Covering topics from speech recognition to web language resources, this collection will be of great value to both linguists entering the field and businesses hoping to implement linguistics-based solutions.

This book focuses on the semantic particularities of the French language, covering five empirical themes: determiners, adverbs, tense and aspect, negation, and information structure. The specialists contributing here—including general linguists in France and French linguists in the Netherlands—take formal approaches to semantics and its interface with syntax and pragmatics, highlighting meaning in its relation to both structure and use. Their results should be of particular interest to French and Romance linguists who want to study French from a formal semantic perspective and to general linguists who are interested in cross-linguistic semantics.

While neuroscientists garner success in identifying brain regions and in analyzing individual neurons, ground is still being broken at the intermediate scale of understanding how neurons combine to encode information. This book proposes a method of representing information in a computer that would be suited for modeling the brain's methods of processing information.

Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are introduced here to model how the brain distributes each piece of information among thousands of neurons. It had been previously thought that the grammatical structure of a language cannot be encoded practically in a distributed representation, but HRRs can overcome the problems of earlier proposals. Thus this work has implications for psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science, and engineering.