Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

An introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP). The text contains the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. Topics covered include: mathematical and linguistic foundations; statistical methods; collocation finding; word sense disambiguation; and probalistic parsing.

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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.