Aims of the book

This book has three main aims: familiarity with tools and techniques for handling text corpora, knowledge of the characteristics of some of the available corpora, and a secure grasp of the fundamentals of statistical natural language processing. Specific objectives include:

1.

grounding in the use of UNIX corpus tools.

2.

understanding of probability and information theory as they have been applied to computational linguistics.

3.

knowledge of fundamental techniques of probabilistic language modelling.

4.

experience of implementation techniques for corpus tools.

We believe that practical application of the techniques is essential for a clear understanding of what is going on, so provide exercises which will allow you to test your understanding and abilities.