Introduction to Natural Language Processing

A survey of computational methods for understanding, generating, and manipulating human language, which offers a synthesis of classical representations and algorithms with contemporary machine learning techniques.

This textbook provides a technical perspective on natural language processing--methods for building computer software that understands, generates, and manipulates human language. It emphasizes contemporary data-driven approaches, focusing on techniques from supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The first section establishes a foundation in machine learning by building a set of tools that will be used throughout the book and applying them to word-based textual analysis. The second section introduces structured representations of language, including sequences, trees, and graphs. The third section explores different approaches to the representation and analysis