19.270 guides to computational linguistics

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 270.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 08:39:04 +0100
         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
         Subject: guides to computational linguistics

Thanks to everyone who suggested introductory
guides to activities in computational
linguistics. In the end I chose the following for
the target audience of MA students from the humanities:

Hajic , Jan. 2004. "Linguistics Meets Exact
Sciences". In Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth 2004: 79-87.

Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin. 2000.
Speech and Language Processing. An Introduction
to Natural Language Processing, Computational
Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall.

Manning, Christopher D., and Hinrich Schütze.
1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language
Processing. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Mitkov, Ruslan, ed. 2003. The Oxford Handbook of
Computational Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilks, Yorick. "Natural Language Processing".
1996. Communications of the ACM 39, no. 1: 60-2, followed in that issue by
Guthrie, Louise et al. "The Role of Lexicons in
Natural Language Processing". 63-72.
Wiebe, Janyce, Graeme Hirst, and Diane Horton.
"Language Use in Context." 102-11.

Wilks, Yorick. 1972. Grammar, Meaning and the
Machine Analysis of Language. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul. "Meaning and machines", pp. 1-8.

Zampolli, Antonio. 2001. "Language resources: the
current situation and opportunities for
co-operation between Computational Linguistics
and Humanities Computing". In New Media and the
Humanities: Research and Applications.
Proceedings of the first seminar Computers,
literature and philology, Edinburgh, 709
September 1998. Ed. Domenico Fiormonte and
Jonathan Usher. Oxford: Humanities Computing Unit.

Hajic, it seems to me, gives quite a good
overview of everything, as a Companion author
should. (Apologies for omitting the hachek on the
terminal letter in his name.) Wilks is always
wonderful to read; the 1972 account, coming
shortly after the "black book" was published on
the Machine Translation project (i.e. the ALPAC
report, available online from the National
Academies Press site), gives an almost
eye-witness view. And if everyone in CL/NLP wrote
like Manning and Schütze I might change fields.
(Actually, no, I wouldn't now, but had I
encountered their book long before it was written
I'd have gone in a different direction....)
Zampolli writes (wrote, alas!) the way someone
learns to write to works at the levels of power
he worked, but the plea for CL opening its eyes
to us and us to it is as down-to-earth and
passionate and persuasive as those things get.

Yours,
WM

Dr Willard McCarty | Reader in Humanities
Computing | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Kay House, 7
Arundel Street | London WC2R 3DX | U.K. | +44
(0)20 7848-2784 fax: -2980 ||
willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
Received on Fri Sep 09 2005 - 02:26:33 EDT