Natural Language Books

This is not an audio CD. Its a interactive CD Rom. I was diapointed. But it has good information.

Our kindergarten class read the book A Home for Pearl Squirrel. The book was good, sad, and fun. The party was good and bad. No one could go to Pearl's new house. SL liked when Pearl invited the other animals. A lot of us like the end. LW liked when Pearl talked to the animals, JT liked when Pearl invited the deers. JQ and BP liked Spike. SA liked when Pearl woke spike.JG liked the skunk. You should read it.

Mr. R's kindergarten class 2008

This is the first book (properly written) on Immersive Audio Signal Processing so a big thumbs up. A USC graduate myself, I have much respect for the Authors. Like most DSP books it includes a couple of (redundant) chapters on transforms and filter design. The books assumes the reader has basic knowledge of DSP and all the required math background.
The chapter on Acoustics covers several useful topics but still needs more elaboration. New to this area, I had to refer to other resources to fully understand the concepts and mathematical equations. The topic of Psychoacoustics is also briefly touched. The book becomes much more useful from the 4th chapter on Immersive Audio Rendering and the following chapters on Equalization. A good thing is that these chapters also include material from both the authors research papers and refer to a large number of useful papers and journal articles. Future directions in research that are mentioned at the end of each chapter could be quite useful for people that are beginning their research in Immersive Audio.
Overall I would say that the book is a good effort and would be very useful for graduate and PhD students doing research in this area.

This was the textbook for my class on Formal Semantics. It was quite thin, and I felt that it needed more discussion on some topics, but it covers most of the basic material. I guess from an instructor's point of view, this book gives them the flexibility to run the course the way they want. But it can be hard for a student to self-teach oneself using this book.

When a boy joins his father in the amazon to start a jaguar preserve, he finds many more dangers than he expected. very good descriptions, and interesting plot. recomnded to niddle and late elementry schoolers, even older.

This book has a wealth of solid information about knowledge representation (KR). It is focused on Multinets, an advanced type of semantic network. The author brings years of experience to this subject. The book deals thoroughly with many aspects of KR such as relationships, categories, generalization, real vs hypothetical, cardinality, and variability, just to name a few. Although the book is focused on Multinets, the concepts should be relevant to other knowledge representation schemes.

Frequent natural language statements clarify the issues under discussion. For example, here are two of the statements on page 49 that illustrate different types of information that can be communicated by "is".

"'A bachelor is an adult unmarried man.' (Relation EQU), 'The cherry is red.' (Relation PROP), . . ."

In other words, the first "is" links equivalent ideas, the second "is" indicates "red" as a property.

The book also contains numerous, well designed, helpful diagrams.

Unfortunately, the jargon is very thick, and difficult to navigate. For example, from page 20: "As already mentioned, the arcs of the semantic network have to be considered as epistemologically and cognitively justified categories which function as fundamental deep semantic relations in the framework of meaning representation." After reading this sentence several times, I think part of what it means is "the arcs of semantic networks should match actual deep semantic relations". But I'm not sure. I frequently find myself reading sentences several times, then moving on, only partly satisfied.

If you can get past the jargon, the book contains a thorough, solidly supported treatment of the knowledge representation of natural language.

Perhaps someone with more prior experience with knowledge representation would find the book more approachable.

Based on the quantity of information, the strong relevance to knowledge representation and the clarifying examples, I give this a generous 4 star rating. However, I'm worried that some readers will find the jargon so impenetrable that the book would lose most of its value to them.

This is a lovely book, bright colors and engaging photos. It is good for kids from pre-school through 2nd grade, although I wouldn't buy it for a second grader. (Too easy.) It provides lots of opportunities to count and that is good.

The author discusses theory in the first chapters and practice in the last chapters. I was more interested in theory, so the book seemed to diminuendo. For a reader who is more interested in practice, the book may seem to crescendo.

First, the author makes a quick overview of the history of second language education. It seems that the student's own language was barred from the classroom for the first time in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. If this is true, then most foreign language teachers today are 100 years behind the times.

A Korean English teacher once told me that it was dangerous for foreign language students to practice conversation where there was no teacher or no native speaker to correct errors. I didn't have the documentation handy, so I couldn't tell her that students could do better without all that error correction anyway. Too bad I didn't have the documentation in this book.

The author also summarizes schools of foreign language education other than his own baby. I have wondered how nouns could be taught in TPR (Total Physical Response), now I see that they are used as objects ("Put the book on the table"). The psychological method, the series method, the phonetic method, the direct method, and the audiolingual method are briefly defined.

We have used many of the WH&O books in our shop and all have been invaluable. For the new Natural programmer to the seasoned expert...these books provide good examples and "how-to" for everyone. Whenever we mis-place one we quickly reorder...no-one in our department will give theirs up!!

This book, while a bit dated, is still the best discussion of a wide variety of (nonstatistical) parsing methods in print. The best part of this book is the table on p. 191, where the author compares the runtimes of the various parsing algorithms, and shows that the one with the scariest "big O" complexity is actually the fastest in practice. This is a very important lesson to impart to budding computer scientists: use "big O" analysis wisely, not as the voice of God, as to which algorithm is the best practical algorithm.

I've given this book 4 stars instead of 5 stars because it is a little out of date: look elsewhere for the best discussions of quantifier scope handling and discourse. Also, it doesn't contain any discussions on the what is today the more fashionable statistical-based approaches, but the jury is still out, IMHO, on whether this is a drawback or not.