Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition (Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence)

This book takes an empirical approach to language processing, based on applying statistical and other machine-learning algorithms to large corpora.Methodology boxes are included in each chapter. Each chapter is built around one or more worked examples to demonstrate the main idea of the chapter. Covers the fundamental algorithms of various fields, whether originally proposed for spoken or written language to demonstrate how the same algorithm can be used for speech recognition and word-sense disambiguation. Emphasis on web and other practical applications. Emphasis on scientific evaluation. Useful as a reference for professionals in any of the areas of speech and language processing.

It's worth comparing this book to the other recent NLP text: Manning and Shutze. Jurafsky and Martin cover much more ground, including many aspects that are ignored by Manning and Schutze. So if you want a general overview of natural language, if you want to know about the syntax of English, or the intricacies of dialog, if you are teaching or taking a general NLP course, then Jurafsky and Martin is the one for you. But if your needs are more focused on the algorithms for lower-level text processing with statistical techniques, or if you want to build a specific practical application, then Manning and Schutze is far more comprehensive and likely to have your answer. If you're a serious student or professional in NLP, you just have to have both.


An excellent introduction to NLP...   November 23, 2000
maiku (USA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

I started reading James Allen's Natural Language Understanding to get background information on an NLP indepedent study project. The book was good, but I still found some points unclear and turned to Jurafsky/Martin for more information. In the end I found Jurafsky very comprehensive and much more down to earth than Allen. (They make useful references to popular movies and culture without sacrificing their academic reputation.) The work introduces basic NLP concepts as Allen does, but then presents applications that continually refer back to the methods. For example, Allen explains the Viterbi algorithm as a method for tagging sentences. Jurafsky/Martin present it, then refer to it in applications such as spell checking, voice recognition, and sentence tagging. The book also serves as a useful guide to finding the more significant NLP papers for further research. If you're interested in NLP this is an excellent place to start!


Most comprehensive introduction to NLP   July 22, 2001
Felix Wyss (Bloomington, IN USA)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

This book is a feat for anybody interested in Natural Language Processing and probably the most comprehensive book on this subject. It provides an in-depth overview of the most important aspects of NLP from regular expressions to sense disambiguation, discourse, and machine translation. I particularly like the bibliographical and historical notes in each chapter, which provide additional historical context and lots of references.

The book is well written and carefully structured. However, it contains several silly typos (real-word errors) that are a bit embarrassing, considering the topic of the book.

This book does not cover the hardware components of speech recognition. It only provides an introduction to the computational aspects. Nevertheless, I don't think the title is misleading (as other reviewers claim), but the back-cover should mention that it doesn't cover the electronic and signal processing components of speech recognition.


Great introductions and reference book   August 9, 2008
carheg (Germany)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I read the first edition of that book and it is terrific. The second edition is much more adapted to current research. Statistical methods in NLP are more detailed and some syntax-based approaches are presented. My specific interest is in machine translation and dialogue systems. Both chapters are extensively rewritten and much more elaborated. I believe this book is perfect for everyone who starts in speech and language processing. With precision, coherent examples and some humor, this book give a great introduction into this topic as well as material for already experienced readers.


must buy   April 20, 2000
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

This is an excellent text if you what to learn speech and language processing. It gives a complete spectrum ranging from speech processing to natural language processing, and computational linguistics. I really enjoy reading this book.