Parsing Efficiency is crucial when building practical natural language systems. 'Ibis is especially the case for interactive systems such as natural language database access, interfaces to expert systems and interactive machine translation. Despite its importance, parsing efficiency has received little attention in the area of natural language processing. In the areas of compiler design and theoretical computer science, on the other hand, parsing algorithms 3 have been evaluated primarily in terms of the theoretical worst case analysis (e.g. lXn», and very few practical comparisons have been made. This book introduces a context-free parsing algorithm that parses natural language more efficiently than any other existing parsing algorithms in practice. Its feasibility for use in practical systems is being proven in its application to Japanese language interface at Carnegie Group Inc., and to the continuous speech recognition project at Carnegie-Mellon University. This work was done while I was pursuing a Ph.D degree at Carnegie-Mellon University. My advisers, Herb Simon and Jaime Carbonell, deserve many thanks for their unfailing support, advice and encouragement during my graduate studies. I would like to thank Phil Hayes and Ralph Grishman for their helpful comments and criticism that in many ways improved the quality of this book. I wish also to thank Steven Brooks for insightful comments on theoretical aspects of the book (chapter 4, appendices A, B and C), and Rich Thomason for improving the linguistic part of tile book (the very beginning of section 1.1).

This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. With it, you'll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication. Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you: Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or identify "named entities" Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligence This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages -- or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works -- you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.

Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.

Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications is the first comprehensive single-source guide to building robust and accurate multilingual NLP systems. Edited by two leading experts, it integrates cutting-edge advances with practical solutions drawn from extensive field experience. Part I introduces the core concepts and theoretical foundations of modern multilingual natural language processing, presenting today’s best practices for understanding word and document structure, analyzing syntax, modeling language, recognizing entailment, and detecting redundancy. Part II thoroughly addresses the practical considerations associated with building real-world applications, including information extraction, machine translation, information retrieval/search, summarization, question answering, distillation, processing pipelines, and more. This book contains important new contributions from leading researchers at IBM, Google, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, BBN, CMU, University of Edinburgh, University of Washington, University of North Texas, and others. Coverage includes Core NLP problems, and today’s best algorithms for attacking them Processing the diverse morphologies present in the world’s languages Uncovering syntactical structure, parsing semantics, using semantic role labeling, and scoring grammaticality Recognizing inferences, subjectivity, and opinion polarity Managing key algorithmic and design tradeoffs in real-world applications Extracting information via mention detection, coreference resolution, and events Building large-scale systems for machine translation, information retrieval, and summarization Answering complex questions through distillation and other advanced techniques Creating dialog systems that leverage advances in speech recognition, synthesis, and dialog management Constructing common infrastructure for multiple multilingual text processing applications This book will be invaluable for all engineers, software developers, researchers, and graduate students who want to process large quantities of text in multiple languages, in any environment: government, corporate, or academic.

Up to now there has been no scientific publication on natural lan guage research that presents a broad and complex description of the current problems of parsing in the context of Artificial Intelli gence. However, there are many interesting results from this domain appearing mainly in numerous articles published in pro fessional journals. In view of this situation, the objective of this book is to enable scientists from different countries to present the results of their research on natural language parsing in the form of more detailed papers than would be possible in professional jour nals. This book thus provides a collection of studies written by well known scientists whose earlier publications have greatly contributed to the development of research on natural language parsing. Jaime G. Carbonell and Philip J. Hayes present in their paper "Robust Parsing Using Multiple Construction-Specific Strategies" two small experimental parsers, implemented to illustrate the advantages of a multi-strategy approach to parsers, with strategies selected according to the type of construction being parsed at any given time. This presentation is followed by the description of a parsing algorithm, integrating some of the best features of the two smaller parsers, including case-frame instantiation and partial pat tern-matching strategies.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the interface of computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Providing an overview of international work in this interdisciplinary field, this book gives the reader a panoramic view of both early and current research in NLP. Carefully chosen multilingual examples present the state of the art of a mature field which is in a constant state of evolution. In four chapters, this book presents the fundamental concepts of phonetics and phonology and the two most important applications in the field of speech processing: recognition and synthesis. Also presented are the fundamental concepts of corpus linguistics and the basic concepts of morphology and its NLP applications such as stemming and part of speech tagging. The fundamental notions and the most important syntactic theories are presented, as well as the different approaches to syntactic parsing with reference to cognitive models, algorithms and computer applications.