Survey of the state of the art in human language technology Ed. by Giovanni Varile, Antonio Zampolli, Ronald Cole, Joseph Mariani, Hans Uszkor- EiT, Annie Zaenen, and Victor Zue (review)

Abstract

214 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 1 (2000) ern Queensland), where core case marking is determined by the tense of the clause. Another extension is in the analysis of case stacking, which is found in Kayardild. This is a very interesting book. The literature survey and background to LFG are presented clearly so even those with no background in LFG would have little difficulty following the thrust of N's argument. AU the steps in N's exposition of her theory are supported by copious and well-chosen examples from a number of languages. [Claire Bowern, Australian National University.] Survey of the state of the art in human language technology. Ed. by Giovanni Varile, Antonio Zampolli, Ronald Cole, Joseph Mariani, Hans UszkorEiT , Annie Zaenen, and Victor Zue. (Studies in natural language processing .) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xx, 513. Cloth $49.95. This collection of essays is a 'survey' in the sense of 'a broad coverage' rather than in the sense of 'an introduction', and as a broad coverage of the field of human language technology, it succeeds admirably . It covers every field of current industrial importance (where that is defined as 'areas in which job opportunities have been posted on the LINGUIST list over the past two years'). The topics covered in this book include fields that aren't often discussed in books intended for an audience of linguists. For instance, in addition to the expected chapters on speech recognition, parsing, and speech synthesis, there are sections on handwritten character recognition , information extraction, and multimodality. One example of the comprehensive scope of this book is the presence of an entire section on the oft-neglected subject of the evaluation ofnatural language systems. The authors and companies that contributed to this volume add considerably to its prima facie credibility . Many of the chapters are authored by researchers whose names will be immediately recognizable to people in their fields. These include James Flanagan, Ronald Kaplan, Lauri Karttunen, Martin Kay, Richard Sproat, and Victor Zue. Furthermore, many of the authors come from companies with international reputations in human language technology, including Bell Labs, Dragon Systems, SRI, and Xerox. The focus of the book is much more on the 'technology ' than the 'language' side of human language technology. As a result, this book may be of more interest to industrial linguists whose professional life requires that they quickly become acquainted with a new area of technology than to graduate students looking for a research topic. It is not an introductory text, and many sections may not be very readable for those who lack some exposure to computational linguistics, computer science, or electrical engineering . However, for the prepared reader, it is an excellent resource. Multi-author collections like this can suffer from lack ofcohesion and unevenness ofquality. This one suffers from neither—it shows very clearly the two years of editing that went into its production. The structure and organization ofthe book are both useful and consistent. Coverage of every topic includes an introductory section that defines terms and issues, a section that describes the current state of the art, and a section on directions for future development. This structure ensures that material on every topic is both approachable by the neophyte (assuming, as discussed above, some previous experience with computational linguistics , computer science, or electrical engineering) and adequate to the needs of the more sophisticated reader. My only complaint relates to the glossary. It is probably better described as a list ofexpanded abbreviations than a 'glossary', and even at that it falls short. For instance, the terms ACCOR, ALBAYZIN, ARS, ATR, BRAMSHILL, and five other abbreviations or acronyms are all 'defined' as 'a language corpus', and lack even expansions of their abbreviated forms. This is the only shortcoming in an otherwise exemplary book. [K. Bretonnel Cohen, MapQuest.com.] Matériaux pour l'étude des classes grammaticales dans les langues créoles . Ed. by Daniel Véronique. Aixen -Provence: Publications de l'Universit é de Provence, 1996. Pp. 306. Despite its title, this diverse and pleasing volume is not a collection of comparative grammatical data for Creole languages (such a work, using a special framework, is currently under preparation by a team led by John Holm...