Guest Editors’ Introduction for Special Issue on Applications of Computational Linguistics in Multimedia IoT Services

The Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) [4] is the combination of interfaces, protocols, and associated multimedia-related information, which enables advanced services and applications based on the human-to-device and device-to-device interactions in physical and virtual environments. The rapid growth in multimedia-on-demand traffic that refers to audio, video, and images has drastically shifted on the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) [1, 5] from scalar to IoMT, which is an integral part of multimedia services such as real-time content delivery, online games, and video conferencing on the global Internet [3, 4]. Complementarily, Computational Linguistics (CL) [2] is an interdisciplinary research field concerned with the processing of languages by computers. Since machine translation began to emerge in the early 1970s, CL has grown and developed exponentially. Nevertheless, the combination of IoT-based multimedia with CL services has received less attention so far and has emerged as a new research paradigm for future computing applications. The future of smart IoMT devices with NLP is more important in real-time systems such as speech understanding, emotion recognition, and home automation. There are several issues and technical challenges that need attention from the research community. The rapid growth of multimedia IoT services (data abstraction, data sharing, data mining) has led the way to incorporating CL techniques to meet its requirements. This special issue presents multimedia IoT services in real-time systems and highlights the open research challenges to get advantageous use of CL.