Review of: Speech and language processing

Abstract

The book ‘‘Speech and Language Processing’’, al material or ideas not covered in the main text withDaniel Jurafsky and James Martin, Prentice Hall suggestions for further reading for those interested in2000, will be of interest not only to those who are particular aspects of the topic. The exercises provideworking within the fields of speech and language the reader with the opportunity to practice theprocessing but also to those who are new to the fields techniques and/or methods introduced in the chapter.of natural language processing, computational lin- Where appropriate, points of theory introduced inguistics and speech recognition. It covers the major each chapter are supported by illustrations to en-areas related to speech and language processing and hance the written text. For a reader unfamiliar withprovides a comprehensive review of the field. the subject matter the text is well-written, clear andThe text is divided into four sections covering the concise. The book begins with a good introductorymain themes of Words, Syntax, Semantics and chapter that outlines the areas that will be covered inPragmatics. These sections are divided into chapters the remainder of the book.covering particular areas of the main themes such as Because the field of speech and language process-Morphology and Finite-State Transducers and ing is encompassed by different but overlappingDialogue and Conversational Agents. In addition areas such as computational linguistics, natural lan-there are a number of useful appendices as well as an guage processing, speech recognition and computa-extensive bibliography which is in excess of 20 tional psycholinguistics, a brief history is given ofpages. Throughout the text there are numerous the main motivational factors in these areas from thepointers to other sources of reading. Each chapter 1940s until 1999.begins with an outline of the material to be covered The book introduces the algorithms that are theand ends with a summary, bibliographical and his- basis on which each particular field has developed.torical notes and exercises. The summary outlines This is particularly advantageous for those new tothe main points covered with emphasis on key words this field of study but can be skipped by those whoor phrases whilst the bibliographical and historical already have some knowledge in this field. Examplesnotes section draws the reader’s attention to addition- are also used to illustrate aspects of theory.The book has been written in such a way that it is