Rating: 
Summary: The a good introduction to NLP, but could be improved
Review: This book helped me accomplish what I set out to do; namely to obtain an overview of the field of natural language processing, with an emphasis on language understanding (as opposed to recognition). And I can recommend it on that level. The weakness of the book however is that it left me asking, "OK, now what?". The book started off strong with a number of dynamic-programming algorithms, finite automaton models, and N-grams that one could sink his/her teeth into from an algorithmic point-of-view. But when it came to actual techniques for natural-language understanding (chapters 14-17) the goods were not delivered. The algorithms disappeared, and the best I could find was in Chapter 15 an incomplete, and unconvincing treatment of Hiyan Alshawi's semantic parsing techniques which fueled the Core Language Engine last decade. Chapter 16 dealt with lexical semantics and was almost entirely devoid of algorithms. My gut feeling after reading this text is that parsing techniques will likely give way to statistical and probabilistic learning methods that will in some sense bypass the need to correctly or accurately parse language. I cannot fault the authors for not exploring this in more depth,as this represents the cutting edge for both NLP and artificial intelligence. In any case, I'm off to read Schutze and Manning's book which will hopefully provide a bit more focus on that perspective. What intrigues me is that most people can understand some language, but very few people understand the grammar of their own language, especially if they have been deprived of a formal education. So why should computers need to know all about grammar rules and parsing? Could they instead be trained by simply being exposed to enough interactions between language and objects? I teach in a department dominated by both foreign and immigrant students. I understand them most of the time, but I would estimate that half the time their sentences or utterances would not fail to be parsed correctly.
Rating: 
Summary: Most comprehensive introduction to NLP
Review: This book is a feat for anybody interested in Natural Language Processing and probably the most comprehensive book on this subject. It provides an in-depth overview of the most important aspects of NLP from regular expressions to sense disambiguation, discourse, and machine translation. I particularly like the bibliographical and historical notes in each chapter, which provide additional historical context and lots of references. The book is well written and carefully structured. However, it contains several silly typos (real-word errors) that are a bit embarrassing, considering the topic of the book. This book does not cover the hardware components of speech recognition. It only provides an introduction to the computational aspects. Nevertheless, I don't think the title is misleading (as other reviewers claim), but the back-cover should mention that it doesn't cover the electronic and signal processing components of speech recognition.
Rating:
Summary: Most comprehensive introduction to NLP
Review: This book is a feat for anybody interested in Natural Language Processing and probably the most comprehensive book on this subject. It provides an in-depth overview of the most important aspects of NLP from regular expressions to sense disambiguation, discourse, and machine translation. I particularly like the bibliographical and historical notes in each chapter, which provide additional historical context and lots of references. The book is well written and carefully structured. However, it contains several silly typos (real-word errors) that are a bit embarrassing, considering the topic of the book. This book does not cover the hardware components of speech recognition. It only provides an introduction to the computational aspects. Nevertheless, I don't think the title is misleading (as other reviewers claim), but the back-cover should mention that it doesn't cover the electronic and signal processing components of speech recognition.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but many errors
Review: This book is a great general introduction to NLP, covering a broad range of topics. Unfortunately there are many errors in the mathematical formulae and the algorithm descriptions, so do make sure to download the errata list from the book's home page.
Rating:
Summary: Strong on Theory
Review: This book is strong on theory, and good for people who like that kind of thing. Though it took me over a week on a single page (The Earley Context Free Grammar Algorithm) to get it, it is a very good algorithm once I understood it. It explains most of the aspects of this science that are necessary, though it could have gone into more depth on the recognition and synthesis parts. I recommend buying this book only if you're very serious about learning about this subject, because it's definitely a workout for your brain.
Rating:
Summary: A great book for language processing applications!
Review: This book provides an excellent comprehensive text on natural language processing and computational linguistics. I have found this book to be a valuable reference for professionals building language aware applications.
Rating:
Summary: must buy
Review: This is an excellent text if you what to learn speech and language processing. It gives a complete spectrum ranging from speech processing to natural language processing, and computational linguistics. I really enjoy reading this book.
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