Natural Language Processing Comprehensive Overview

Author: (USA) Jurafsky
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-06-01
Features: This book is an excellent textbook that comprehensively and systematically covers computer natural language processing. Since its English publication, it has received widespread acclaim. Many renowned universities abroad have selected it as the primary textbook for courses in natural language processing and computational linguistics. The book is hailed as the "gold standard" for textbooks in this field. It contains a wealth of content, divided into four parts and 21 chapters, delving deeply into various aspects of how computers process natural language, including vocabulary, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and introducing modern techniques in natural language processing. From a hierarchical perspective, the book discusses the different levels of natural language step by step, starting with automatic morphological analysis of words, followed by automatic syntactic analysis, then automatic semantic analysis of various linguistic units, and finally automatic analysis of coherent texts, intelligent agents for dialogue and conversation, and natural language generation. From a technical perspective, the book covers a broad range of topics such as regular expressions, finite-state automata, text-to-speech conversion, probabilistic models of pronunciation and spelling, automatic part-of-speech tagging, n-gram models, hidden Markov models, context-free grammars, feature and unification, lexical parsing and probabilistic parsing, first-order predicate calculus, word sense disambiguation, rhetorical structure theory, and machine translation. The book is characterized by four key features: "comprehensive coverage, practical focus, emphasis on evaluation, and corpus-based approach." Additionally, the companion website provides relevant resources and tools to help readers further improve their skills in practice. This book is not only suitable as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in universities taking courses in natural language processing and computational linguistics but also serves as an invaluable reference for researchers and professionals in related fields.