This book offers a unified vision of speech and language processing, presenting state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques for both speech and text-based processing of natural language. This comprehensive work covers both statistical and symbolic approaches to language processing; it shows how they can be applied to important tasks such as speech recognition, spelling and grammar correction, information extraction, search engines, machine translation, and the creation of spoken-language dialogue agents.

Grishman offers a readable account of the issues faced by Natural Language Processing research. The discussion is bolstered by examples from some of the more interesting NLP systems. These examples are shallow, permitting a light read and keeping the focus of the book on linguistic issues. The majority of the book covers standard syntactic and semantic parsing techniques, while discourse analysis, anaphora resolution and text generation receive only a quick treatment (review by Brad Cupp).

Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and electronic information services, information is becoming available on-line at an incredible rate. One result is the oft-decried information overload. No one has time to read everything, yet we often have to make critical decisions based on what we are able to assimilate. The technology of automatic text summarization is becoming indispensable for dealing with this problem. Text summarization is the process of distilling the most important information from a source to produce an abridged version for a particular user or task.

Until now there has been no state-of-the-art collection of the most important writings in automatic text summarization. This book presents the key developments in the field in an integrated framework and suggests future research areas. The book is organized into six sections: Classical Approaches, Corpus-Based Approaches, Exploiting Discourse Structure, Knowledge-Rich Approaches, Evaluation Methods, and New Summarization Problem Areas.