Where Humans Meet Machines: Innovative Solutions for Knotty Natural-Language Problems brings humans and machines closer together by showing how linguistic complexities that confound the speech systems of today can be handled effectively by sophisticated natural-language technology. Some of the most vexing natural-language problems that are addressed in this book entail   recognizing and processing idiomatic expressions, understanding metaphors, matching an anaphor correctly with its antecedent, performing word-sense disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary words and phrases.

Preface.- Making the Case for an Open, Unified System Architecture in Response to Rapid Developments in the Natural Language Industry: Translingual Automatic Language Exploration System (TALES).- The Burgeoning of Medical Social-Media Postings and the Need for Improved Natural Language Mapping Tools.- Machine Translation: the Enterprise Point of View.- Speech-Enabled Unified Communications: Overcoming the Multilingual Challenges of the European Market.- Exploiting Lexical Sensitivity in Performing Word-Sense Disambiguation.- Summarizing Short Texts through a Discourse-Centered Approach in a Multilingual Context.- Handling Two Difficult Challenges for Text-to-Speech Synthesis Systems:  Out-of-Vocabulary Words and Prosody -- A Case Study in Romanian.- MAP: An Abstraction-Based Metaphor Analysis Program for Overcoming Cross-Modal Challenges.- Translation of Idiomatic Expressions across Different Languages: A Study of the Effectiveness of TransSearch.- Argumentation-Based Dialog Systems for Medical Training.- Design of Dialog-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Simulate Human-to-Human Tutoring.- TCAD: Vocabulary Acquisition Tool for Motivating Bilingual Pupils with Hearing Impairments in Learning English.- A Hybrid Approach to Automated Rating of Foreign Language Proficiency Using Oral Test Responses.- Multilingual Systems, Translation Technology and Their Impact on the Translator's Profession.- Editors' biographies.