First, note that I have used Zen in the title of this book. I have been asked many times why I used such an esoteric term. After all, what is the meaning of Zen? To clarify the meaning of Zen, we must examine the philosophical environment that gave rise to Zen: Indian and Chinese philosophies. In India, Buddhism arose out of a Hindu...

In 2009, it is estimated that more than 1.5 billion people have access to the Internet, including 220 million in the U.S. alone. Throw in 338 million Chinese users, 55 million German users, 48 million British users, 38 million Russian users, and 67 million Brazilians, and you can see the meaning of the word “world” in the...

As future generation information technology (FGIT) becomes specialized and fragmented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in FGIT have common threads and, because of this, advances in one discipline may be transmitted to others. Presentation of recent results obtained in different disciplines encourages this interchange for the...

This Festschrift volume, dedicated to He Jifeng on the occasion of his 70th birthday in September 2013, includes 24 refereed papers by leading researchers, current and former colleagues, who congratulated at a celebratory symposium held in Shanghai, China, in the course of the 10th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing,...

As the title of this book suggests, it is an update of the first edition of the Handbook of Natural Language Processing which was edited by Robert Dale, Hermann Moisl, and Harold Somers and published in the year 2000. The vigorous growth of new methods in Natural Language Processing (henceforth, NLP) since then, strongly suggested that...

Human civilization in the 21st century can be defined by diversity and duality. One-fifth of the world’s population is Chinese, another fifth Muslim. A hundred million of us are homeless children living in extreme poverty. More than two percent of the human population is mentally retarded. There are over 10,000 spoken languages. Yet, a...

The 13 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The workshop served to present the current state of the art in the new...