Review ... 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 EdinburghSpeech 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 TorontoThis book is an absolute necessity for instructors at all levels, as well as an indispensable 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 MarylandThis 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 From the Inside Flap Preface This is an exciting time to be working in speech and language processing. Historically distinct fields (natural language processing, speech recognition, computational linguistics, computational psycholinguistics) have begun to merge. The commercial availability of speech recognition and the need for Web-based language techniques have provided an important impetus for development of real systems. The availability of very large on-line corpora has enabled statistical models of language at every level, from phonetics to discourse. We have tried to draw on this emerging state of the art in the design of this pedagogical and reference work:Coverage In attempting to describe a unified vision of speech and language processing, we cover areas that traditionally are taught in different courses in different departments: speech recognition in electrical engineering; parsing, semantic interpretation, and pragmatics in natural language processing courses in computer science departments; and computational morphology and phonology in computational linguistics courses in linguistics departments. The book introduces the fundamental algorithms of each of these fields, whether originally proposed for spoken or written language, whether logical or statistical in origin, and attempts to tie together the descriptions of algorithms from different domains. We have also included coverage of applications like spelling-checking and information retrieval and extraction as well as areas like cognitive modeling. A potential problem with this broad-coverage approach is that it required us to include introductory material for each field; thus linguists may want to skip our description of