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 author's 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.