Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing , Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence)

The text of the book seems pretty decent. However, for me it loses almost all of its value thanks to the absolutely worthless table of contents (which just lists chapter names) and index (10 pages of references to random generic words, instead of words that are actually relevant to speech and language processing).The book is a thousand pages long. Why the hell would you not simply add sections in the table of contents?

Terrific book, arrived promptly, fairly good nick, absolutely fit for purpose.

There are many books about NLP (and speech processing), but I really enjoy this one.It's easy to understand and it has plenty of exercises that are very useful for hands on experience.

It's just fun

A complete and reasonably detailed description of the field.I recommend it to anyone who wish to get a good, overall knowledge of NLP,and to anyone who would like to design a teaching curriculum about it.

this is a great book which touches on NLP and its related fields. It is readable and does a great job at explaining many topics related to speech and language processing.

Nothing to complain about

Anyone considering buying this will probably know about it already but just in case, here is some comment. It is extremely comprehensive. It assumes no knowledge of the subject. However, it assumes you are happy to plough through detailed descriptions of algorithms and up to about half a page at a time of equations with lots of sigma signs and conditional probabilities. If you are not comfortable with that, don't get it: It is well explained but dense - and long.