An Introduction to Language Processing with Perl and Prolog

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.

• Parsing
• computational linguistics
• corpus
• linguistics
• morphology
• natural language processing
• semantics

From the reviews:

"This book presents a concise introduction to natural language processing both theoretical and practical in nature with emphasis on English, French and German language structure. … The text is suitable for researchers and students of natural language processing and computational linguistics … . In fact, there is an elaborate internet site … dedicated to this book … ." (Rainer Horsch, Zentrablatt MATH, Vol. 1096 (22), 2006)

"This comprehensive NLP textbook is strongly algorithm-oriented and designed for talented computer programmers who might or might not be linguists. … Nugue’s book is also useful to working professionals as a handbook of techniques and algorithms. … this is an unusually useful and well-written book, and I plan to recommend it to my students as well as using it myself as a handbook." (Michael A. Covington, Computational Lingustics, Vol. 33 (4), 2007)

• Institutionen för Datavetenskap, Lunds Tekniska Högskola, Lund, Sweden

  Pierre M. Nugues

Pierre Nugues’ research is focused on natural language processing for advanced user interfaces and spoken dialogue. This includes the design and the implementation of conversational agents within a multimodal framework and text visualization. He led the team that designed a navigation agent - Ulysse - that enables a user to navigate in a virtual reality environment using language, and the team that designed the CarSim system that generates animated 3D scenes from written texts.

Pierre Nugues has taught natural-language processing and computational linguistics at the following institutions: ISMRA, Caen, France; University of Nottigham, UK; Staffordshire University, UK; FH Konstanz, Germany; Lund University, Sweden; and Ghent University, Belgium.

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