Book Reviews: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

This foundational text is presented as the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP), reflecting how statistical approaches to processing natural language text had become dominant. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools, providing broad but rigorous coverage of both the mathematical and linguistic foundations of the field. It also includes detailed discussion of statistical methods so that students and researchers can construct their own implementations.

In terms of scope, the book covers a range of core NLP applications, including collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications. By combining rigorous theory with practical algorithms, it serves as a reference that lets readers build their own implementations, making it a comprehensive resource for students and researchers entering the field.