Peter Jackson

This text, co-authored with Isabelle Moulinier and first published by John Benjamins in 2002, describes applications of NLP technology to the world of Internet search and publishing.  It is now available in a second revised edition.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

1. Natural Language Processing
1.1. What is NLP?
1.2. NLP and Linguistics
1.3. Linguistic Tools
1.4. Plan of the Book

2. Document Retrieval
2.1. Information Retrieval
2.2. Indexing Technology
2.3. Query Processing
2.4. Evaluating Search Engines
2.5. Attempts to Enhance Search Engine Performance
2.6. The Future of Web Searching

3. Information Extraction
3.1. The Message Understanding Conferences
3.2. Regular Expressions
3.3. Finite Automata in FASTUS
3.4. Context Free Grammars
3.5. Limitations of Current Technology and Future Research
3.6. Summary of Information Extraction

4. Text Categorization
4.1. Overview of Categorization Tasks and Methods
4.2. Handcrafted Rule Based Methods
4.3. Inductive Learning for Text Classification
4.4. Nearest Neighbor Algorithms
4.5. Combining Classifiers
4.6. Evaluation of Text Categorization Systems

5. Towards Text Mining
5.1. What is Text Mining?
5.2. Reference & Coreference
5.3. Automatic Summarization
5.4. Testing of Automatic Summarization Programs
5.5. Prospects for Text Mining

Isabelle Moulinier is a Lead Research Scientist in the R&D lab at Thomson.  She previously studied at Paris VI and Pierre et Marie Curie Universities in France, and worked for IBM in Paris.  Her Ph.D. was in the area of text categorization.

Since joining Thomson in 1997, she has worked in the areas of non-English information retrieval, concept search, and vertical search engines for legal documents and business news, leading to the launch of a number of new portals around the world.

Reviews of the 1st Edn

"The book is a very good, concise reference book, filled with many theoretical principles and practical guidelines." (In Linguist List, vol 14, 226, 2003)

"I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in NLP and its applications to the challenges brought about by the  arrival of the information age." (In Terminology, vol 10(1), 2004)

"Some special features of the book include solid coverage of evaluation techniques in every chapter, excellent endnotes, and references to exactly the right stuff." (In Language, 80(1), 2004)