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Speech and Language Processing

``This book is an absolute necessity for instructors at all levels, as well as an indispensible reference for researchers. Introducing NLP, computational linguistics, and speech recognition comprehensively in a single book is an ambitious enterprise. The authors have managed it admirably, paying careful attention to traditional foundations, relating recent developments and trends to those foundations, and tying it all together with insight and humor. Remarkable.''
    -- Philip Resnik, University of Maryland

``... ideal for ... linguists who want to learn more about computational modeling and techniques in language processing; computer scientists building language applications who want to learn more about the linguistic underpinnings of the field; speech technologists who want to learn more about language understanding, semantics and discourse; and all those wanting to learn more about speech processing. For instructors ... this book is a dream. It covers virtually every aspect of NLP... What's truly astounding is that the book covers such a broad range of topics, while giving the reader the depth to understand and make use of the concepts, algorithms and techniques that are presented... ideal as a course textbook for advanced undergraduates, as well as graduate students and researchers in the field.
    -- Johanna Moore, University of Edinburgh

``Speech and Language Processing is a comprehensive, reader-friendly, and up-to-date guide to computational linguistics, covering both statistical and symbolic methods and their application. It will appeal both to senior undergraduate students, who will find it neither too technical nor too simplistic, and to researchers, who will find it to be a helpful guide to the newly established techniques of a rapidly growing research field.''
    -- Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto

``The field of human language processing encompasses a diverse array of disciplines, and as such is an incredibly challenging field to master. This book does a wonderful job of bringing together this vast body of knowledge in a form that is both accessible and comprehensive. Its encyclopedic coverage makes it a must-have for people already in the field, while the clear presentation style and many examples make it an ideal textbook.''
    -- Eric Brill, Microsoft Research

This is quite simply the most complete introduction to natural language and speech technology ever written. Virtually every topic in the field is covered, in a prose style that is both clear and engaging. The discussion is linguistically informed, and strikes a nice balance between theoretical computational models, and practical applications. It is an extremely impressive achievement.
    -- Richard Sproat, AT&T Labs -- Research