An excellent overview

Work on Natural Language processing has been going on for at leastthirty years. In the past most natural language processing (NLP)applications where mainly in the research realm. The rapid increase in computer processing power and disk storage capacityhave moved NLP from research into the area of applied science.This gives NLP the feel of a new and vibrant area. Progress isbeing made rapidly, but the research literature can be difficultfor someone who has no experience with NLP. Simply learning theterminology can be time consuming.This book areas of NLP applied to natural language text.Both Jackson and Moulinier have been involved in implementingNLP applications in a commercial context, so there is asome concentration on applying NLP in real applications, ratherthan artificial contexts like the Message Understand Conferencedata set.I purchased this book for its coverage of Information Extraction.Along with this book I read a number of papers from the researchliterature. One paper I found particularly interesting wasa paper on the FASTUS NLP system developed by researchers atSRI. I was very happy to see that FASTUS and finite automataapproaches were covered in more detail in this book.For my purposes I would have liked a book that moved froman overview of various NLP applications to more implementationdetail. For example, while I think that I understand push down automata from working on parsers for compilers,I don't fully understand them in the NLP context. This bookdid not go into enough detail to make this clear.I cannot really offer this lack of detail as a criticismsince I don't believe that it was the authors intention toprovide this level of detail. Their objective is to providea detailed overview and I think that they succeeded in doingthis. A book that provided this overview withdetails on implementation would be much longer, perhaps thesize of Manning and Schutze's excellent book "Foundations ofNatural Language Processing" (Manning and Schutze providea great deal of detail, but they do not cover information extraction).

Excellent

I recommend this very highly. The words "online applications" in the title suggest that this book is about NLP for websites, but it's much more general than that; certainly any of the technologies discussed in it could in fact be implemented on a website, but "online applications" should be interpreted as meaning something like "applications that are made possible or commercially viable written review articles.The first chapter of the book discusses some of the general issues and challenges in natural language processing, on a levelthat should be accessible to pretty much anyone. (Actually, one of the really outstanding features of this book is its overall readability.) Subsequent chapters focus on information retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization. The final chapter has shorter sections on other topics, including summarization and named entity recognition.All chapters of the book are characterized by high readability, clear explanations of algorithms (and I say that as someone who struggles with ANY algorithm), and good explanations of the relevant evaluation metrics.This book would be a good starting point for anyone; if you're not a beginner in natural language processing, you'll still find much that's useful in this book.