{"id":957,"date":"2010-10-10T10:00:22","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=957"},"modified":"2010-07-22T15:06:03","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T13:06:03","slug":"advanced-programming-in-prolog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=957","title":{"rendered":"Advanced programming in PROLOG"},"content":{"rendered":"
Advanced programming in PROLOG for computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.<\/strong> By Rodrigue Sabin Mompelat<\/strong>. (LINCOM studies in computational linguistics 01.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2007. Pp. 246. ISBN 9783895863592<\/a>. $147.42.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by John D. Phillips<\/strong><\/a>, Yamaguchi University, Japan<\/em><\/p>\n

This textbook, which examines Prolog for text processing, aims to make students capable of using and building systems with linguistic data, such as dictionaries and large text corpora. Although the author assumes a basic knowledge of Prolog and an ability to write programs, this text is not written for particularly advanced students. M first provides a general explanation of each subject and then expands the discussion with a programming example and exercises. Sample answers to the exercises, along with the programs used in the examples, are collected at the end of the book.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s sixteen chapters are divided into four parts. Part 1 explains character input, how to read a line or sentence from an unformatted text file, and the implementation of several sorting algorithms. Part 2 builds on these programs to create word frequency lists, a key word in context (KWIC) concordance program, and a vocabulary test for learners of English. Part 3 implements finite state automata and transducers to create a word-hyphenation program for dictionary look-up and a simple morphological analyzer for Danish nouns. Part 4 implements a relational database, paying particular attention to modularity, robustness, and the user-interface.<\/p>\n

From the book\u2019s title, one may expect to find discussion of definite clause grammars, parsing, formal semantics, knowledge representation, and inference, but none of these topics are mentioned. The book is concerned with words and characters, not sentences or meanings. It will be of use to those with a basic knowledge of Prolog who want to try their hand at corpus linguistics and to teachers designing courses using Prolog for text processing or database management.<\/p>\n

A prominent feature of this book is the way each chapter builds on the one before it to create a library of useful functions and templates. Part of the programming for each new example and exercise has already been detailed earlier in the book. However, one shortcoming of the text is the poor editing. In a couple of places it is difficult to understand what the author means: the many infelicities interrupt smooth reading and distract from the subject matter. The publisher\u2019s policy of minimal editorial intervention may have advantages to the throughput and cost of the often valuable linguistic resources they publish; however, it may also allow for problems such as the poor editing and the inappropriate title of this volume, which make the book less useful than it could have been. With its high price and narrow scope, this is mainly a book for libraries, where it will be a useful reference work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Advanced programming in PROLOG for computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. By Rodrigue Sabin Mompelat. (LINCOM studies in computational linguistics 01.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2007. Pp. 246. ISBN 9783895863592. $147.42. Reviewed by John D. Phillips, Yamaguchi University, Japan This textbook, which examines Prolog for text processing, aims to make students capable of using and building systems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"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\/957"}],"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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":958,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions\/958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}