Results from the theory and implementation of artificial languages are used in this book to deal with the processing of natural language. Chapter 1, “Introduction,” discusses the main differences between natural and artificial languages. Handling these differences computationally is the main topic of this book. The second chapter, “Speech, Phonology and Morphology,” presents how speech is understood and then represented as a string of words.

The third chapter, “Syntax,” deals with the syntax of natural language: syntactic categories, the structure of sentences, the description using grammars, the representation by trees, and some kinds of networks. The evolution of these representations is presented together with the problems they solved.

The next chapter, “Parsers,” presents the design of the parser for natural language. The authors describe an implementation in PROLOG, which is then improved to solve other problems of natural language.

The fifth chapter, “Semantics,” deals with semantics as a further step after finding the syntactic structure of a sentence. Some descriptions based on grammars and nets are presented.

The next chapter, “Pragmatics,” discusses the correct interpretation of a sentence using context information. The methods of representation are frames and scripts. A long section deals with the structure of dialogues.

The last chapter, “Text Generation,” deals with this topic as the inverse of understanding natural language. Some problems described are question generation, template approaches, and more complex generation. The book has many useful exercises; their solutions appear in an appendix. All the examples are taken from a 10-line text presented in the introduction. An appendix shows a complete grammar for this text.

This basic textbook fulfills its purposes. The book will be useful for researchers and students in computer software; linguists can also find useful material. The references are new and good, and I like the typography.

The book covers all topics in its domain. The presentation is clear and appropriate for teaching. The chapters are well organized, and the main problems are outlined as chapter and section titles. The examples and exercises are useful.

I did not like the presentation of the definitions and classification. The definitions do not begin with the term to be defined, but start with a description and then include an expression like “this is called….” The classifications are not obvious; alternatives and their descriptions are hard to find. The chapter about speech understanding is special; other authors do not include this approach. This book is an excellent text on natural language processing.