{"id":2138,"date":"2012-05-24T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-05-24T08:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=2138"},"modified":"2012-05-22T11:49:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-22T09:49:49","slug":"the-handbook-of-computational-linguistics-and-natural-language-processing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=2138","title":{"rendered":"The handbook of computational linguistics and natural language processing"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;\"><strong>The handbook of computational linguistics and natural language processing<\/strong>. Ed. by <strong>Alexander Clark<\/strong>, <strong>Chris Fox<\/strong>, and <strong>Shalom Lappin<\/strong>. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. 800. ISBN <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldcat.org\/title\/handbook-of-computational-linguistics-and-natural-language-processing-1-publ\/oclc\/707173280&amp;referer=brief_results\">9781405155816<\/a>. $209.95 (Hb).<\/div>\n<p align=\"right\">Reviewed by <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/linguistlist.org\/people\/personal\/get-personal-page2.cfm?PersonID=117721\">Thomas Hoffmann<\/a><\/strong>, <em>University of Osnabr\u00fcck<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Great technological advancements of the past thirty years have led to a significant increase in computational speed and efficiency, and the success of the computer has had an enormous impact on the field of linguistics. The present handbook on computational linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) should, therefore, be of great interest to a large number of graduate students and researchers.<\/p>\n<p>The volume is divided into four parts and covers all of the main fields of CL and NLP research. Following the editors\u2019 concise introduction (1\u20138), Part 1 provides the \u2018Formal foundations\u2019 of the two disciplines. First, <strong>Shuly Wintner<\/strong> gives an overview of the elementary concepts of formal language theory (11\u201342), which includes a detailed discussion of basic issues such as formal language classes and the Chomsky Hierarchy. Next, <strong>Ian Pratt-Hartmann<\/strong> investigates computational resources in time and space in \u2018Computational complexity in natural language\u2019 (43\u201373). <strong>Ciprian Chelba<\/strong>\u2019s chapter, \u2018Statistical language models\u2019 (74\u2013104), follows and, among other topics, reviews probabilistic n-gram models and their relation to Markov systems, and compares them with models generated by probabilistic context-free grammars. The final chapter of Part 1 by <strong>Mark-Jan Nederhof<\/strong> and <strong>Giorgio Satta<\/strong> (\u2018Theory of parsing\u2019, 105\u201330) focuses on the parsing of several context-free grammars and compares these with dependency grammar parsers and tree adjoining grammars.<\/p>\n<p>Part 2 presents current methods employed in CL and NLP and begins with five chapters on widely used and influential techniques for machine learning, namely, \u2018Maximum entropy models\u2019 by <strong>Robert Malouf<\/strong> (133\u201353), \u2018Memory-based learning\u2019 by <strong>Walter Daelemans<\/strong> and <strong>Antal van den Bosch<\/strong> (154\u201379), \u2018Decision trees\u2019 by <strong>Helmut Schmid<\/strong> (180\u201396), \u2018Unsupervised learning and grammar induction\u2019 by <strong>Alexander Clark<\/strong> and <strong>Shalom Lappin<\/strong> (197\u2013220), and \u2018Artificial neural networks\u2019 by <strong>James B. Henderson<\/strong> (221\u201337). Following is a chapter by <strong>Martha Palmer<\/strong> and <strong>Nianwen Xue<\/strong>, \u2018Linguistic annotation\u2019 (238\u201370), which deals with CL and NLP issues of corpus annotation, and a chapter by <strong>Philip Resnik<\/strong> and <strong>Jimmy Lin<\/strong>, which addresses the issue of evaluation of NLP systems (271\u201395).<\/p>\n<p>CL and NLP approaches to various linguistic domains comprise the focus of Part 3, \u2018Domains of application\u2019: <strong>Steve Renals<\/strong> and <strong>Thomas Hain<\/strong> concentrate on phonetic issues and acoustic modelling in automatic speech recognition (299\u2013332). This is followed by a chapter on the statistical parsing (333\u201363) of syntactic corpus data by <strong>Stephen Clark<\/strong>, a contribution on segmentation and morphology (364\u201393) by <strong>John A. Goldsmith<\/strong>, and an article by <strong>Chris Fox<\/strong> on computational semantics (394\u2013428). \u2018Computational models of dialogue\u2019, by <strong>Jonathan Ginzburg <\/strong>and <strong>Raquel Fern\u00e1ndez<\/strong> (429\u201381), and \u2018Computational psycholinguistics\u2019, by <strong>Matthew W. Crocker<\/strong> (482\u2013513), round off Part 3.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, Part 4 (\u2018Applications\u2019) of the book deals with engineering tasks that NLP and CL procedures have been applied to, namely, \u2018Information extraction\u2019 (<strong>Ralph Grishman<\/strong>, 517\u201330), \u2018Machine translation\u2019 (<strong>Andy Way<\/strong>, 531\u201373), \u2018Natural language generation\u2019 (<strong>Ehud Reiter<\/strong>, 574\u201398), \u2018Discourse processing\u2019 (<strong>Ruslan Mitkov<\/strong>, 599\u2013629) and \u2018Question answering\u2019 (<strong>Bonnie Webber<\/strong> and <strong>Nick Webb<\/strong>, 630\u201354).<\/p>\n<p>Handbook editors always have the difficult task of deciding which topics to include and which to omit. This task is even more daunting for a handbook on a field as vibrant and dynamic as CL and NLP, which can never be documented exhaustively. Nevertheless, the editors of the present volume have succeeded in compiling a collection of articles that together constitute a state-of-the art introduction to CL and NLP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The handbook of computational linguistics and natural language processing. Ed. by Alexander Clark, Chris Fox, and Shalom Lappin. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. 800. ISBN 9781405155816. $209.95 (Hb). Reviewed by Thomas Hoffmann, University of Osnabr\u00fcck Great technological advancements of the past thirty years have led to a significant increase in computational speed and efficiency, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2139,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions\/2139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}