Briefly Noted

“Grammar inference, automata induction, “Our volume has two goals. One is to and language acquisition” by Rajesh G. present some recent results in active areas of Parekh and Vasant Honavar the three domains that converge in the new “The symbolic approach to ANN-based nat- field. The other one is to celebrate the 50th ural language processing” by Michael Wit- birthday of Gheorghe P˘aun, who, from for- brock mal language theory, promoted the new re- “The subsymbolic approach to ANN-based natural language processing” by Georg search area and made seminal contributions Dorffner to it.... All the papers are contributed by “The hybrid approach to ANN-based natural Gheorghe P˘aun’s collaborators, colleagues, language processing” by Stefan Wermter friends, and students in the five continents, “Character recognition with syntactic neural who wanted to show in this way their recog- networks” by Simon Lucas nition to him for his tremendous work. We “Compressing texts with neural nets” by have collected 38 papers by 75 authors here. J¨urgen Schmidhuber and Stefan Heil (Another set of 38 papers by 65 authors will “Neural architectures for information re- be published soon in the future.)”—From the trieval and database query” by Chun- editors’ preface Hsien Chen and Vasant Honavar “Text ” by Dieter Merkl “Text and discourse understanding: The DIS- Recent Advances in Natural Language CERN system” by Risto Miikkulainen Processing II: Selected Papers from RANLP ’97 Where Mathematics, Science, Nicolas Nicolov and Ruslan Mitkov Linguistics, and Biology Meet: Essays (editors) in Honour of Gheorghe P˘aun (University of Sussex and University of Wol- verhampton) Carlos Mart´ın-Vide and Victor Mitrana (editors) Amsterdam: John Benjamins (Current issues (Rovira i Virgili University and University of in linguistic theory, volume 189), 2000, Bucharest) xi+422 pp; hardbound, ISBN 1-55619-966-X and 90-272-3695-X, $84.00 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, xv+446 pp; hardbound, ISBN 0-7923-6693-X, $176.00, £112.00, Dfl 360.00 “This volume brings together [31] revised versions of a selection of papers presented at “There are not many scientific fields as in- the Second International Conference on ‘Re- terdisciplinary as formal language theory. In cent Advances in Natural Language Process- this volume, it is presented as the very inter- ing’ (RANLP’97) held in Tzigov Chark, Bul- section point of Mathematics, Computer Sci- garia, 11–13 September 1997.”—From the edi- ence, Linguistics, and Biology. This book is a tors’ foreword collection of papers which closely examines classical topics in inspired Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX by formal languages, as well as showing new Stephen J. Hegner, Paul McKevitt, Peter concepts and problems motivated in linguis- Norvig, and Robert Wilensky (editors) tics and biology. The papers are organized (Ume˚a University, University of Ulster, into four sections: Grammars and Grammar NASA Ames Center, and Univer- Systems, Automata, Languages and Combi- sity of California, Berkeley) natorics, and Models of Molecular Comput- Reprinted from Artificial Intelligence Review, ing. They clearly prove the power, wealth, 14(1–5), 2000. and vitality of the theory nowadays and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, sketch some trends for its future develop- 2001, xii+420 pp (no index); hardbound, ment. The volume is intended for an audi- ISBN 0-7923-6641-7, $190.00, £135.00, ence of computer scientists, computational –C220.00 linguists, theoretical biologists, and any other people interested in dealing with the prob- This collection of papers concerns artificial- lems and challenges of interdisciplinarity.”— intelligence (AI) and cognitive-science tech- From the publisher’s announcement, with minor niques applied to the problem of providing corrections help systems for the UNIX operating sys-

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