Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation Analysis and Retrieval of Information by Computer (Addison-Wesley series in computer science)

Rating:
Summary: Very readable book with good coverage of topics
Review: It's a pity that most of the author's books seem to be out of print, since he's a very clear writer. This book isn't necessarily accessible to the complete beginner--the intended audience is advanced computer science students, computational linguists/natural language processing people, and library/information science students--but if you fall into one of those categories, you should find this a very readable book. The coverage of topics is heavily slanted towards practical applications--editting and formatting, compression, encryption, file access, information retrieval, indexing, abstracting, spell checking, syntax and style checking--rather than towards theoretical background. That's not a bad thing, though--for many of those topics, this might be the most accessible resource you'll find.

The book was published in the late 80's, and hence is a bit dated by now--for instance, the statistical revolution in NLP pretty much isn't covered (Bayes doesn't even show up in the index). However, that in no way detracts from the value of what IS covered.

Rating:
Summary: Very readable book with good coverage of topics
Review: It's a pity that most of the author's books seem to be out of print, since he's a very clear writer. This book isn't necessarily accessible to the complete beginner--the intended audience is advanced computer science students, computational linguists/natural language processing people, and library/information science students--but if you fall into one of those categories, you should find this a very readable book. The coverage of topics is heavily slanted towards practical applications--editting and formatting, compression, encryption, file access, information retrieval, indexing, abstracting, spell checking, syntax and style checking--rather than towards theoretical background. That's not a bad thing, though--for many of those topics, this might be the most accessible resource you'll find.

The book was published in the late 80's, and hence is a bit dated by now--for instance, the statistical revolution in NLP pretty much isn't covered (Bayes doesn't even show up in the index). However, that in no way detracts from the value of what IS covered.