An Introduction To Language Processing With Perl And Prolog

This book teaches the principles of natural language processing and covers linguistics issues. It also details the language-processing functions involved, including part-of-speech tagging using rules and stochastic techniques. A key feature of the book is the author's hands-on approach throughout, with extensive exercises, sample code in Prolog and Perl, and a detailed introduction to Prolog. The book is suitable for researchers and students of natural language processing and computational linguistics.

The areas of natural language processing and computational linguistics have continued to grow in recent years, driven by the demand to automatically process text and spoken data. With the processing power and techniques now available, research is scaling up from lab prototypes to real-world, proven applications. This book teaches the principles of natural language processing, first covering practical linguistics issues such as encoding and annotation schemes, defining words, tokens and parts of speech and morphology, as well as key concepts in machine learning, such as entropy, regression and classification, which are used throughout the book. It then details the language-processing functions involved, including part-of-speech tagging using rules and stochastic techniques, using Prolog to write phase-structure grammars, syntactic formalisms and parsing techniques, semantics, predicate logic and lexical semantics and analysis of discourse and applications in dialogue systems. A key feature of the book is the author's hands-on approach throughout, with sample code in Prolog and Perl, extensive exercises, and a detailed introduction to Prolog. The reader is supported with a companion website that contains teaching slides, programs and additional material. The second edition is a complete revision of the techniques exposed in the book to reflect advances in the field the author redesigned or updated all the chapters, added two new ones and considerably expanded the sections on machine-learning techniques.

Research into Natural Language Processing - the use of computers to process language - has developed over the last couple of decades into one of the most vigorous and interesting areas of current work on language and communication. This book introduces the subject through the discussion and development of various computer programs which illustrate some of the basic concepts and techniques in the field. The programming language used is Prolog, which is especially well-suited for Natural Language Processing and those with little or no background in computing. Following the general introduction, the first section of the book presents Prolog, and the following chapters illustrate how various Natural Language Processing programs may be written using this programming language. Since it is assumed that the reader has no previous experience in programming, great care is taken to provide a simple yet comprehensive introduction to Prolog. Due to the 'user friendly' nature of Prolog, simple yet effective programs may be written from an early stage. The reader is gradually introduced to various techniques for syntactic processing, ranging from Finite State Network recognisors to Chart parsers. An integral element of the book is the comprehensive set of exercises included in each chapter as a means of cementing the reader's understanding of each topic. Suggested answers are also provided. An Introduction to Natural Language Processing Through Prolog is an excellent introduction to the subject for students of linguistics and computer science, and will be especially useful for those with no background in the subject.

Explains how computers can be programmed to recognize the complex ambiguities of human language. Addresses: current techniques in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; program listings showing applications in Prolog; and question answering and inference. Targeted at professionals in the artificial inte.

"This book provides pertinent and vital information that researchers, postgraduate, doctoral students, and practitioners are seeking for learning about the latest discoveries and advances in NLP methodologies and applications of NLP"--Provided by publisher.

This book explains how can be created information extraction (IE) applications that are able to tap the vast amount of relevant information available in natural language sources: Internet pages, official documents such as laws and regulations, books and newspapers, and social web. Readers are introduced to the problem of IE and its current challenges and limitations, supported with examples. The book discusses the need to fill the gap between documents, data, and people, and provides a broad overview of the technology supporting IE. The authors present a generic architecture for developing systems that are able to learn how to extract relevant information from natural language documents, and illustrate how to implement working systems using state-of-the-art and freely available software tools. The book also discusses concrete applications illustrating IE uses. · Provides an overview of state-of-the-art technology in information extraction (IE), discussing achievements and limitations for the software developer and providing references for specialized literature in the area · Presents a comprehensive list of freely available, high quality software for several subtasks of IE and for several natural languages · Describes a generic architecture that can learn how to extract information for a given application domain

Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies are the three main research areas within Philology. Scientific production, such as conferences and journals, has tended towards specialization, and has been traditionally classified according to separate disciplines and languages. However, this volume offers a holistic view of the wide area of Philology, therefore allowing the permeability of the three areas mentioned above. As such, this book shows that the line that separates Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies is actually very thin. This volume is composed of a miscellanea of philological studies dealing with various trends in Modern Language research. It looks at three languages in particular: Spanish, English and French, with a special relevance to the first two.

A gentle introduction to programming for students and researchers interested in conducting computer-based analysis in linguistics, this book is an ideal starting point for linguists approaching programming for the first time. Assuming no background knowledge of programming, the author introduces basic notions and techniques needed for linguistics programming and helps readers to develop their understanding of electronic texts.The book includes many examples based on diverse topics in linguistics in order to demonstrate the applicability of the concepts at the heart of programming. Practical examples are designed to help the reader to:*Identify basic issues in handling language data, including Unicode processing*Conduct simple analyses in morphology/morphosyntax, and phonotactics*Understanding techniques for matching linguistic patterns*Learn to convert data into formats and data structures suitable for linguistic analysis*Create frequency lists from corpus materials to gather basic descriptive statistics on texts*Understand, obtain and 'clean up' web-based data*Design graphical user interfaces for writing more efficient and easy-to-use analysis tools.Two different types of exercise help readers to either learn to interpret and understand illustrative sample code, or to develop algorithmic thinking and solution strategies through turning a series of instructions into sample programs. Readers will be equipped with the necessary tools for designing their own extended projects.Key Features:*Ideal introduction for students of linguistics attempting to process corpus materials or literary texts for dissertations, theses or advanced research work*Linguistic examples throughout the text clearly demonstrate the application of programming theory and techniques*Coverage ranging from basic to more complex topics and methodologies enables the reader to progress at their own pace*Two chapters on the advantages of modularity and associated issues provid