Focused on providing a brief history of artificial intelligence (AI) theories, this book is divided into five complementary chapters. The first chapter is an introduction. The second chapter quickly tells the history of AI, beginning with computer scientists, for example, Turing, Minsky, McCulloch, and Pitts, up through Collins and Quillian; including examples of how a machine can be self-learning; and focusing on the work of those who developed the concepts of priming, spreading activation, and the semantic web.

Chapter 3, “Where Corpus Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Meet,” covers recent developments in the field of linguistics, particularly the lexical priming theory. The main point it describes is the creation of “assistants,” developed by IBM in the early 1980s and used nowadays in mobile and desktop devices, from Android and Google Assistant to Apple’s Siri and Amazon Echo. Chapter 4, “Take Home Messages for Linguists and Artificial Intelligence Designers,” explores developments in linguistics that, “so far, have not been seen in AI applications.” Chapter 5 provides a summary and conclusions.

Despite its size--just 134 pages--this is actually a big book: it includes a complete review of complex concepts, considering the AI world and its convergence with linguistics. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in a deep study of linguistics and its association with AI.