Introduction to Computational Linguistics

Author: Yu Shiwen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-09-01
Features: This textbook systematically introduces the fundamental theories of computational linguistics, related natural language processing technologies, and their applications from three aspects: "Basics," "Algorithms," and "Applications."
The Basics section (Chapters 1-3) primarily covers the fundamental mathematical and linguistic concepts of computational linguistics, the relationship between computational linguistics and natural language processing technologies, and the basic workflow of natural language processing. Additionally, as one of the important branches of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics has seen significant development. The basic concepts, fundamental theories, and recent advancements in corpus linguistics are introduced in Chapter 3. The purpose of this section is to provide readers with a preliminary yet comprehensive understanding and mastery of computational linguistics without delving into technical details.
The Algorithms section (Chapters 4-5) focuses on introducing common techniques and algorithms in computational linguistics. From the perspective of processing objects, it includes lexical-level analysis techniques, syntactic-level analysis techniques, and semantic-level processing techniques. From the perspective of processing methods, it covers both traditional rule-based approaches and corpus-based statistical methods. The main objective of this section is to enable students, after studying this chapter, to gain a general understanding of some mainstream technologies in the field of computational linguistics (e.g., the application of Hidden Markov Models in part-of-speech tagging, GLR algorithms, and certain analysis techniques) and to apply these technologies in practical computational linguistics-related work.
The Applications section (Chapters 6-7) primarily teaches natural language processing application systems. It should be noted that there are many application systems based on language information processing technologies, but this textbook only focuses on introducing some common systems. It explains the working mechanisms, development, and achievements of these systems while objectively discussing their existing problems and challenges. This includes machine translation systems, information retrieval systems, information extraction systems, text classification systems, and more.