Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis - Digital Edition

Author(s) : Fernando C. N. Pereira, Stuart M. Shieber
ISBN : 0-9719997-0-4
Paperback : 273 pages
Publication Date : July 1987
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

This book is suggested by Mike Goins

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Book excerpts:

This book is an introduction to elementary computational linguistics from the point of view of logic programming. The connection between computational linguistics and logic programming has both formal and utilitarian aspects. On the formal side, this book explores the restricted logical language of definite clauses as a means of expressing linguistic analyses and representations. On the utilitarian side, this book introduces the logic-programming language Prolog, whose backbone is the definite-clause formalism, as a tool for implementing the basic components of natural-language-processing systems.

The main goal of the book is to enable the reader to acquire, as quickly as possible,a working understanding of basic computational linguistic and logic programming concepts. To achieve this goal, the book is organized around specific concepts and programming techniques, with examples supported by working programs. Most of the problems involve programming and also supplement the material in the main text. Although we have emphasized experimental rather than analytic or comparative questions, all concepts and techniques covered are given rigorous, if informal, theoretical justification.

Given the orientation of the book, it limited the discussion of issues of a more general nature, such as comparisons with other computational linguistic techniques or formal mathematical results. Three areas stand out among the omissions. First, this book does not compare the logic programming approach with other approaches to natural language processing, in particular the closely related unification-based grammar formalisms. Second, this book does not present or compare the plethora of grammar formalisms based on logic programming. Finally, this book does not address formal-language-theoretic issues of generative power and computational complexity for the formalisms and analysis mechanisms this book present.

Intended Audience:

This book presupposes some acquaintance with elementary notions from logic, formal language theory, computer science and linguistics.

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