A classic

Allen's book is a standard introduction to NLP in industry and academia. His exposition permits straightforward implementation and provides a lucid motivation for the algorithms he describes. "Natural Language Understanding" was the first NLP text I read (for a summer job), and I've always referred to it first for its balance of formal and practical considerations.

However, some developments in the past few years outpace his treatment. In particular, the stochastic viewpoint has become more common in natural-language processing, and Allen does not consider related innovations in great depth. Passing mention of the interaction between NLP and the speech processing and information retrievals would also benefit a revised version.

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