ACCU Home page ACCU Conference Page
Search   Contact us ACCU at Flickr ACCU at GitHib ACCU at Facebook ACCU at Linked-in ACCU at Twitter Skip Navigation

ACCU Menu

Advertisement

Advertisement

Membership

Join ACCU

Login

» Create an account

» Password Reminder

ACCU Buttons

Add them to your site:

ACCU: professionalism in programming (116x31 px)
ACCU: professionalism in programming (225x60 px)

Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
    View all alphabetically
Title:
An Introduction to Natural Language Processing through Prolog
Author:
Clive Mathews
ISBN:
0 582 06622 0
Publisher:
Longman
Pages:
306pp
Price:
£??
Reviewer:
Graham Kendall
Subject:
prolog; languages
Appeared in:
11-4
If you have an interest in an area you normally find that academic books cover the subject in exacting detail and provide lots of references so that you can easily extend your knowledge. This book falls into that area. It starts by introducing Natural Language Processing (NLP), then it introduces Prolog (a logic programming language) and then pulls everything together by combining NLP and Prolog.

Being a declarative language (rather than a procedural language such as C++) you simply state your requirements as a number of facts and then Prolog tries to prove new facts (and ultimately your goal) by inferring new facts.

This is an ideal method of processing for NLP and can lead to small and elegant programs. On the downside you need to have a firm understanding of recursion in order to get the most from the language. Writing a small Prolog program without recursion is not possible for any useful problem. You also need to be able to visualise the way in which your program executes, since defining your facts in a different order can lead to much more efficient programs. This book tackles these areas.

NLP programming is considered a branch of AI and the book contains references to the main AI literature and being a recent book it is up to date with the latest research developments. I would have no hesitation in recommending this book for anybody with an interest (passing or otherwise) in this subject.