 Natural Language Computing |
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If
you have any comments concerning the book, please let me know. In response to
readers, I have added several pages of backup materials to help those using it
in classes or
on their
own. If you have an interesting program, please send it to me. Perhaps we
can place it on this website.
ALL PROLOG and LISP COMPILERS and SOFTWARE are FREE.
TREE DRAWING PRETTY
PRINTERS:
COMPARISON ||
NYU VANILLA ||
LEHNER ||
KOSTKO ||
VINCENT
Here is the Preface and Introduction to the book in Adobe PDF format. You should install the Adobe PDF free software so you can read the newspapers of the world: The NY Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and so on.
From the
time he could pick up a crayon, Pablo Picasso had the ability to sketch pictures
that accurately depicted the things he saw. He was exceptional. Most of us spent
our early years following the dots, painting by number, and drawing on tracing
paper held over someone else's picture. If you are a Pablo Picasso of the
computer, and if computational linguistics comes easy to you, this book may not
be for you. 
But
if you would like a follow-the-dots approach to natural language processing,
linguistic theory, artificial intelligence, machine translation, and expert
systems, you will like this presentation. The basic idea is to present
meaningful answers to significant problems involved in representing human
language data on a computing machine. My main focus is on the grammatical
devices underlying constructions of English, French, and German. I use the
absolute minimum required from any computer hardware or from either of the
computer languages discussed: Prolog and Unix.
This
book, which perhaps should be subtitled start here, offers a hands-on approach
to anyone who wishes to gain a perspective on natural language processing, the
computational analysis of human language data. All of the examples in the book
are illustrated using computer programs that run in Prolog on Macs and PCs.
Included are Prolog interpreters/compilers
for IBM DOS and Windows and Macintosh. All software is free and may be
downloaded from New York University. There are Freeware or Shareware Prolog and
LISP interpreters and compilers for IBM PC and Macintosh. There is no reason to
purchase any software. The included disk automatically loads Prolog and the
programs into an IBM PC.
The programs in the book and updated
versions of the Prolog and LISP interpreters can be downloaded from the NYU
linguistics ftp site or from our resource web pages. We also have some
information about installation and running the programs. A graphics
demonstration can be downloaded and run on an IBM PC with VGA.
The grammatical proposals in the book
follow very closely Noam Chomsky's ideas about generative grammar as illustrated
in the Minimalist Program. The assumption is that the reader knows little, if
anything, about Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and less about Prolog. All
relevant linguistic terminology is defined in the text, in figures, and
illustrated in Prolog programs. Basic terms like level,
phrase, sentence,
morpheme, morphology,
competence, derivation,
computational linguistics, lexical
entry, selection, phrase
marker, primary data, parser,
top-down, bottom-up,
list structures, parallel
processing, and so on are discussed in detail and illustrated in figures.
The
linguistic and computational methodology underlying our presentation follows the
basic research strategy discussed by Noam Chomsky and C.S. Peirce. Peirce's
ideas about abductive, deductive, and inductive logic provide the framework in
which the computational models of human language are proposed. Chomsky has often
mentioned that his ideas correlate closely with those of Peirce. Following
Peirce's dictum: "Write for people who are intelligent, but who know
nothing about your subject," many ideas are presented using game models
(chess and puzzles) and suggestive analogies.
All of the
examples in the book are illustrated using computer programs that run. The
optimal way for a person to get started is to run these existing programs to
gain an understanding of how they work. After gaining such familiarity, you can
start to modify the programs and eventually start to write you own. The optimal
way to learn to create programs is to operate on live ones by modifying existing
code. All programs discussed and a shareware version of Prolog to execute them
are free. If you have a computer, you have no excuse for not running these
programs as you work through the book. The book assumes that you have never
heard of Prolog, which is short for PROgramming in LOGic. The bibliography
contains numerous references to Prolog textbooks for further study.
The materials in the book are graphically presented. That is, any definition or programming concept that is introduced in the examples discussed in the text is also illustrated in one of the numerous full page figures in the book.
All of the
full page figures in the book, and many more, are on the NYU pages and may be
downloaded and printed on a postscript laser to yield an 8.5 x 11 overhead
transparency for classroom use. To make a transparency (8.5 x 11) you should
Figure 7.1. The term grammar is ambiguous.
.
A listing of the basic words in the index. We discuss artifical intelligence, expert systems, sentence processing, computational linguistics, natural language processing, LISP, Prolog, machine translation,...