Speech and Language Processing, 2nd Edition

This is one of the books that I consider as a starting point / reference whenever I need to deal with a practical natural language processing (NLP) problem. I also have Natural Language Processing with Python on my shelf and it's wonderful in terms of providing a practical start for nearly any NLP problem but when the need arises to cover more ground both in terms of theory and practical pitfalls then Jurafsky & Martin is my guide.Natural language processing is a fast-moving target and it is impossible to know about the latest developments in the field without reading recent academic articles so nobody should expect to get the same information from this book, however mastering the concepts and algoritmhs in the book will provide the reader with the necessary background to understand state-of-the-art in NLP.Most of the exercises are very interesting but I wish they had some kind of difficulty level indicated next to them. Another criticism would be that more information on practical implementation details of the algorithms could have been given but I believe these minor criticisms does not lead to a four star rating. It is a very difficult project to give a comprehensive overview of the whole NLP field and Jurafsky & Martin achieved that.

I needed this for class, it is okay definitely goes through the problems and Nlp concepts at a fundamental level which is very useful and insightful. So far I love it.

I purchased this book as a companion to the free Stanford NLP class being taught by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning. The book provides much deeper detail on the topics being discussed in class. I have been working in the field of Speech and Natural Language Processing for years and feel that this is a good "core" book for someone who wants a reference for the current methods in natural language. I also highly recommend the free Stanford class.

I purchased this textbook initially for a class in natural language processing in the Biomedical Informatics domain. Throughout the semester, it provided itself as a excellent reference text and also an added bonus of providing problems that challenged me quite thoroughly. I would suggest this text as a must have if you are interested in the realm of natural language processing and speech processing.

Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin have assembled an incredible mass of information about natural language processing. The authors note that speech and language processing have largely non-overlapping histories that have relatively recently began to grow together. They have written this book to meet the need for a well-integrated discussion, historical and technical, of both fields.In twenty-five chapters, the book covers the breadth of computational linguistics with an overall logical organization. Five chapter groupings organize material on Words, Speech, Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics, and Applications. The four Applications chapters address Information Extraction, Question Answering and Summarization, Dialogue and Conversational Agents, and Machine Translation. The book covers a lot of ground, and a fifty-page bibliography directs readers to vast expanses beyond the book's horizon. The aging content problem present in all such books is addressed through the book's web site and numerous links to other sites, tools, and demonstrations. There is a lot of stuff.While it is an achievement to assemble such a collection of relevant information, the book could be more useful than it is. An experienced editor could rearrange content into a more readable flow of information and increase the clarity of some of the authors' examples and explanations. As is, the book is a useful reference for researchers and practitioners already working in the field. A more clear presentation would lower the experience requirement and make its store of information available to students and non-specialists as well.Readers looking for an introduction to natural language processing might find Manning and Schütze's Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, easier to understand. It is over ten years old, but worth reading for an understanding of basic concepts that are still relevant in the field.

A wonderful book which is used in many Natural Language Processing courses. It covers a huge number of topics, and goes quite deeply into each of them. I didn't intent to purchase this book at first but when I realized how useful it would be to have a physical copy with me, I was not hesitate to get one.

While I'm only six or seven chapters into it, which are of an introductory nature, so far the book is excellent. For anyone interested in automated processing of natural speech, I think this would be a terrific addition. I'm learning a great deal from it, which is very much cementing my foundation in these concepts.

Needless to say, this is a classic in the NLP domain. It is different with most of other NLP book in that it focuses "real" computational linguistics but tons of other books focus on some toolkit or practical methodologies. The book is thorough and comprehensive and suitable for all levels of learners.