When Irish author and filmamaker, Gabriel Murray, found the lost family tomb of Bishop John Kearney, President Obama’s great-uncle, in an ancient Cathedral in Ireland in March 2009, he set off an international media frenzy. The discovery was likened to the plot of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in the international press and the hundreds of sites, which appeared on Google covering the find. Anne Dunham, Obama’s mother, was the grand daughter of Mary Ann Kearney who was a direct descendant of the Bishop in the Kilkenny tomb. This widened the search for Obama’s Irish roots, which originated in Shinrone, Moneygall in Ofally and Cashel in Tipparary. They went even further back to the ancient Kingdom of Thomond where Obama’s roots had had links to the High Kings of Ireland, martyrs and biblical scholars.
Due to the Internet Revolution, human conversational data -- in written forms -- are accumulating at a phenomenal rate. At the same time, improvements in speech technology enable many spoken conversations to be transcribed. Individuals and organizations engage in email exchanges, face-to-face meetings, blogging, texting and other social media activities. The advances in natural language processing provide ample opportunities for these "informal documents" to be analyzed and mined, thus creating numerous new and valuable applications. This book presents a set of computational methods to extract information from conversational data, and to provide natural language summaries of the data. The book begins with an overview of basic concepts, such as the differences between extractive and abstractive summaries, and metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of summarization and various extraction tasks. It also describes some of the benchmark corpora used in the literature. The book introduces extraction and mining methods for performing subjectivity and sentiment detection, topic segmentation and modeling, and the extraction of conversational structure. It also describes frameworks for conducting dialogue act recognition, decision and action item detection, and extraction of thread structure. There is a specific focus on performing all these tasks on conversational data, such as meeting transcripts (which exemplify synchronous conversations) and emails (which exemplify asynchronous conversations). Very recent approaches to deal with blogs, discussion forums and microblogs (e.g., Twitter) are also discussed. The second half of this book focuses on natural language summarization of conversational data. It gives an overview of several extractive and abstractive summarizers developed for emails, meetings, blogs and forums. It also describes attempts for building multi-modal summarizers. Last but not least, the book concludes with thoughts on topics for further development. Table of Contents: Introduction / Background: Corpora and Evaluation Methods / Mining Text Conversations / Summarizing Text Conversations / Conclusions / Final Thoughts
A variety of viewpoints is offered in this timely analysis of China's economy and the future shape of Beijing's energy consumption. The authors, all noted authorities in the fields of economics, diplomacy, energy, and defense, consider an unprecedented range of influences and factors to avoid the limitations of looking at the subject myopically or with political bias. They conclude that while energy insecurity could eventually lead to an arms race at sea or even a naval conflict that neither side wants, there is ample room for Sino-American energy dialogue and cooperation in the maritime domain.
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