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This book is the result of a group of researchers from different disciplines asking themselves one question: what does it take to develop a computer interface that listens, talks, and can answer questions in a domain? First, obviously, it takes specialized modules for speech recognition and synthesis, human interaction management (dialogue, input fusion, andmultimodal output fusion), basic question understanding, and answer finding. While all modules are researched as independent subfields, this book describes the development of state-of-the-art modules and their integration into a single, working application capable of answering medical (encyclopedic) questions such as "How long is a person with measles contagious?" or "How can I prevent RSI?". The contributions in this book, which grew out of the IMIX project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, document the development of this system, but also address more general issues in natural language processing, such as the development of multidimensional dialogue systems, the acquisition of taxonomic knowledge from text, answer fusion, sequence processing for domain-specific entity recognition, and syntactic parsing for question answering. Together, they offer an overview of the most important findings and lessons learned in the scope of the IMIX project, making the book of interest to both academic and commercial developers of human-machine interaction systems in Dutch or any other language. Highlights include: integrating multi-modal input fusion in dialogue management (Van Schooten and Op den Akker), state-of-the-art approaches to the extraction of term variants (Van der Plas, Tiedemann, and Fahmi; Tjong Kim Sang, Hofmann, and De Rijke), and multi-modal answer fusion (two chapters by Van Hooijdonk, Bosma, Krahmer, Maes, Theune, and Marsi). Watch the IMIX movie at www.nwo.nl/imix-film . Like IBM's Watson, the IMIX system described in the book gives naturally phrased responses to naturally posed questions. Where Watson can only generate synthetic speech, the IMIX system also recognizes speech. On the other hand, Watson is able to win a television quiz, while the IMIX system is domain-specific, answering only to medical questions. "The Netherlands has always been one of the leaders in the general field of Human Language Technology, and IMIX is no exception. It was a very ambitious program, with a remarkably successful performance leading to interesting results. The teams covered a remarkable amount of territory in the general sphere of multimodal  question answering and information delivery, question answering, information extraction and component technologies." Eduard Hovy, USC, USA, Jon Oberlander, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Norbert Reithinger, DFKI, Germany .

Human-computer interaction. --- System design. --- User interfaces (Computer systems) -- Design. --- Multimodal user interfaces (Computer systems) --- Multimedia systems --- Information storage and retrieval systems --- Question-answering systems --- Engineering & Applied Sciences --- Computer Science --- Question-answering systems. --- Computer science. --- Information storage and retrieval. --- Multimedia information systems. --- User interfaces (Computer systems). --- Computer Science. --- Multimedia Information Systems. --- Signal, Image and Speech Processing. --- User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction. --- Information Storage and Retrieval. --- Interfaces, User (Computer systems) --- Human-machine systems --- Human-computer interaction --- Computer-based multimedia information systems --- Multimedia computing --- Multimedia information systems --- Multimedia knowledge systems --- Informatics --- Science --- Artificial intelligence --- Problem solving --- Multimedia systems. --- Information storage and retrieva. --- Information storage and retrieval systems. --- Automatic data storage --- Automatic information retrieval --- Automation in documentation --- Computer-based information systems --- Data processing systems --- Data storage and retrieval systems --- Discovery systems, Information --- Information discovery systems --- Information processing systems --- Information retrieval systems --- Machine data storage and retrieval --- Mechanized information storage and retrieval systems --- Computer systems --- Electronic information resources --- Data libraries --- Digital libraries --- Information organization --- Information retrieval --- Signal processing. --- Image processing. --- Speech processing systems. --- Computational linguistics --- Electronic systems --- Information theory --- Modulation theory --- Oral communication --- Speech --- Telecommunication --- Singing voice synthesizers --- Pictorial data processing --- Picture processing --- Processing, Image --- Imaging systems --- Optical data processing --- Processing, Signal --- Information measurement --- Signal theory (Telecommunication)