An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog: An Outline of Theories, Implementation, and Application with Special Consideration of English, French, and German by Pierre M. Nugues - Great algorithm-based book on the subject

The areas of natural language processing and computational linguistics have continued to grow in recent years, driven by the demand to automatically process text and spoken data. With the processing power and techniques now available, research is scaling up from lab prototypes to real-world, proven applications.

This book teaches the principles of natural language processing, first covering linguistics issues such as encoding, entropy, and annotation schemes; defining words, tokens and parts of speech; and morphology. It then details the language-processing functions involved, including part-of-speech tagging using rules and stochastic techniques; using Prolog to write phase-structure grammars; parsing techniques and syntactic formalisms; semantics, predicate logic and lexical semantics; and analysis of discourse, and applications in dialog systems. The key feature of the book is the authors hands-on approach throughout, with extensive exercises, sample code in Prolog and Perl, and a detailed introduction to Prolog. The reader is supported with a companion website that contains teaching slides, programs, and additional material.

The book is suitable for researchers and students of natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Great algorithm-based book on the subject
This book has the same scope as Speech and Language Processing (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence), but that book flies too high over the details. This book does a good job of covering the details without getting lost in them. The author takes the approach of explaining a concept first with excellent illustrations, then explains the algorithm that implements the concept, then shows detailed code in either Prolog or PERL.

This is not to say you can pick up this book without the proper background and get much out of it. Language processing is a field requiring a good background in a number of fields including the theory of computation, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and information theory to name a few. You should be familiar with all of these fields before tackling the book, although the author does introduce these topics somewhat before digging into details.

One thing the author does not do much of is explain Prolog or PERL. He assumes you already know these languages, although there is an appendix at the back of the book covering Prolog. Prolog is a difficult language to learn and is not at all intuitive. However, it is an excellent choice for coding up many algorithms concerning artificial intelligence. Thus, although I do not argue with the author's choice of language, I do recommend that you become fluent in Prolog before you read this book.

I used to recommend Jurafsky and Martin for people starting out learning language processing, but now I think I can recommend this book for not only the big picture but the details of this interesting field as well.

For More 5 Star Reviews, Complete Product Review and The Lowest Prices Please Visit:
Buy An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog: An Outline of Theories, Implementation, and Application with Special Consideration of English, French, and German by Pierre M. Nugues At The Lowest Price!