CAN COMPUTERS meaningfully process human language? If this

is difficult, why? If this is possible, how? This book introduces the

reader to the fascinating science of computational linguistics and

automatic natural language processing, which combines linguistics

and artificial intelligence.

The main part of the book is devoted to the explanation of the inner

working of a linguistic processor, a software module in charge

of translating natural language input into a representation directly

usable traditional artificial intelligence applications and, vice versa,

of translating their answer into human language.

Overall emphasis in the book is made on a well-elaborated,

though—for a number of historical reasons—so far little-known in

the literature computational linguistic model called Meaning

⇔ Text Theory. For comparison, other models and formalisms

are considered in detail.

The book is mainly oriented to researchers and students interested

in applications of natural language processing techniques to Spanish

language. In particular, most of the examples given in the book deal

with Spanish language material—which is a feature of the book distinguishing

it from other books on natural language processing.

However, our main exposition is sufficiently general to be applicable

to a wide range of languages.

Specifically, it was taken into account that many readers of the

book will be Spanish native speakers. For them, some comments on

the English terminology, as well as a short English-Spanish dictionary

of technical terms used in the book, were included. Still, reading

the book in English will help Spanish-speaking readers to become

familiar with the style and terminology used in the scientific literature

on the subject.

IGOR A. BOLSHAKOV

was born in Moscow, Russia,

in 1934. He obtained his M.Sc.

degree in physics in 1956 from

the Department of physics of

the Moscow State “Lomonossov”

University, Ph.D.

degree in information technology

in 1961 from the VYMPEL

Institute, Moscow, Russia,

and D.Sc. degree in computer

science in 1966 from the same

institute. He received the National

Award of USSR in Science

and Technology in 1989.

Since 1996, he works for the

Natural Language and Text

Processing Laboratory of the

Computing Research Center,

National Polytechnic Institute,

Mexico City. He is National

Researcher of Mexico of excellence

level III, author of more

than 200 publications on theory

of radars, theory of probability,

and computational linguistics.

Email: igor@cic.ipn.mx

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ALEXANDER F. GELBUKH

was born in Moscow, Russia, in

1962. He obtained his M.Sc. degree

in mathematics in 1990 from

the Department of mechanics and

mathematics of the Moscow State

“Lomonossov” University and

Ph.D. degree in computer science

in 1995 from the All-Russian Institute

for Scientific and Technical

Information. Since 1997 he is the

head of the Natural Language and

Text Processing Laboratory of the

Computing Research Center, National

Polytechnic Institute, Mexico

City. He is academician of the

Mexican Academy of Sciences,

National Researcher of Mexico of

excellence level I, distinguished

lecturer of the ACM, founder of

the Mexican Association for Natural

Language Processing and the

CICLing international conference

series, author of more than 250

publications on computational

linguistics. Currently he is Distinguished

Visiting Professor at

Chung-Ang University, Seoul,

Korea.

Webpage: www.Gelbukh.com