Eugene Charniak breaks new ground in artificial intelligenceresearch by presenting statistical language processing from an artificial intelligence point of view in a text for researchers and scientists with a traditional computer science background.New, exacting empirical methods are needed to break the deadlock in such areas of artificial intelligence as robotics, knowledge representation, machine learning, machine translation, and natural language processing (NLP). It is time, Charniak observes, to switch paradigms. This text introduces statistical language processing techniques;word tagging, parsing with probabilistic context free grammars, grammar induction, syntactic disambiguation, semantic wordclasses, word-sense disambiguation;along with the underlying mathematics and chapter exercises.Charniak points out that as a method of attacking NLP problems, the statistical approach has several advantages. It is grounded in real text and therefore promises to produce usable results, and it offers an obvious way to approach learning: "one simply gathers statistics."Language, Speech, and Communication

欧仁·查尼阿克（Eugene Charniak），美国布朗大学计算机科学系教授兼系主任。

胡凤国，中国传媒大学文学院副教授。

冯志伟，计算语言学家，专门从事语言学和计算机科学的跨学科研究，现为国家教育部语言文字应用研究所研究员、博士生导师、学术委员会委员。