This book offers a unified vision of speech and language processing, presenting state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques for both speech and text-based processing of natural language. This comprehensive work covers both statistical and symbolic approaches to language processing; it shows how they can be applied to important tasks such as speech recognition, spelling and grammar correction, information extraction, search engines, machine translation, and the creation of spoken-language dialog agents. The following distinguishing features make the text both an introduction to the field and an advanced reference guide.

• UNIFIED AND COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF THE FIELD Covers the fundamental algorithms of each field, whether proposed for spoken or written language, whether logical or statistical in origin.
• EMPHASIS ON WEB AND OTHER PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS Gives readers an understanding of how language-related algorithms can be applied to important real-world problems.
• EMPHASIS ON SCIENTIFIC EVALUATION Offers a description of how systems are evaluated with each problem domain.
• EMPERICIST/STATISTICAL/MACHINE LEARNING APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE PROCESSING Covers all the new statistical approaches, while still completely covering the earlier more structured and rule-based methods.