| In the past 15 years, natural language processing and computational linguistics have considerably matured. The move has mainly been driven by the massive increase of textual and spoken data and the need to process them automatically. This dramatic growth of available data spurred the design of new concepts and methods, or their improvement, so that they could scale up from a few laboratory prototypes to proven applications used by millions of people. Concurrently, speed and capacity of machines became an order of magnitude larger enabling us to process gigabytes of data and billions of words in a reasonable time, to train, test, retrain, and retest algorithms like never before. Although systems entirely dedicated to language processing remain scarce, there are now scores of applications that, to some extent, embed language processing techniques.
The industry trend, as well as the user’s wishes, towards information systems able to process textual data has made language processing a new requirement for many computer science students. This has shifted the focus of textbooks from readers being mostly researchers or graduate students to a larger public, from readings by specialists to pragmatism and applied programming. Natural language processing techniques are not completely stable, however. They consist of a mix that ranges from well mastered and routine to rapidly changing. This makes the existence of a new book an opportunity as well as a challenge.
This book tries to take on this challenge and find the right balance. It adopts a hands-on approach. It is a basic observation that many students have difficulties to go from an algorithm exposed using pseudo-code to a runnable program. I did my best to bridge the gap and provide the students with programs and ready-made solutions. The book contains real code the reader can study, run, modify, and run again. I chose to write examples in two languages to make the algorithms easy to understand and encode: Perl and Prolog. |
