The Literature -- Books and journals

Linguistics

• The ACL-MIT Series in Natural Language Processing contains a number of books, mostly on advanced topics.



• The Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford publishes an extensive collection of books on advanced topics, many of them covering linguistics and computational linguistics (or at least the theory thereof). Access their catalogue and look at the CSLI homepage.

Word morphology

This deals with aspects of word formation such as plurals, hyphenated forms, and various affixes. These are quite common in biology, so it is useful to understand this field. Examples of common prefixes and suffixes are: ortho-, poly-, micro-, -ase, -some, -cin, -ine, -globin, -genic, and many more. Simple "stemming" chops off suffixes, typically to turn plurals into singulars, but more careful manipulations can be done.

• Sproat, Richard. 1992. Morphology and Computation. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1992. ISBN 0-262-19314-0 313 pp. 49 illus. $50.00/£34.50 (cloth). This is an excellent book on this topic.

Statistical NLP

• Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze Cambridge: MIT Press. 1999. ISBN 0-262-13360-1 620 pp. $64.95/£44.95 (cloth). Look here for more details about the book, sample chapters, courses around the country using it, etc.



• Elements of Information Theory by Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas, published by John Wiley, 1991. Here is the authors' own home page for the book. Truly an excellent book on the topics underlying much of statistical natural language processing.

Finite-State Methods

• Finite-State Language Processing by Emmanuel Roche and Yves Schabes (eds.) MIT Press 1997 ISBN 0-262-18182-7 464 pp. $60.00/£41.50 (cloth). Finite-state methods, corresponding roughly to the regular expressions used in Perl, the Java ORO tools, etc., are not as powerful as some parsing techniques but they are theoretically and in practice faster and more efficient than the more general methods. By carefully crafting them and combining various finite-state analyses, practical and fast systems can be built.

Statistical Language Learning

• Statistical Language Learning by Eugene Charniak. MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 0-262-53141-0 192 pp. 80 illus. $17.95/£12.50 (paper). A short book, full of interesting topics.