From: umkeahey@ccu.umanitoba.ca (YOUR NAME HERE)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: NLU Summary
Summary: Summy of NLU references.
Keywords: language understanding natural
Date: 12 Apr 92 17:00:07 GMT
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

A while back I posted a request for references on Natural Language 
Understanding and Processing. My thanks to the respondents, who helped
reaffirm my faith in the net being more than a forum for sending
jokes around the world and engaging in juvenile squabbles over which
text editor *real* programmers use:

   Massimo Poesio <poesio@cs.rochester.edu>
   Michael A. Covington <mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu>
   Espen J. Vestre <espen@coli.uni-sb.de>
   Miles Osborne <miles@minster.york.ac.uk>
   Kathleen Pierco <kp@sunbim.be>

Since several people expressed an interest in seeing the responses, I
am providing this summary of the information I received.
--
From:    Massimo Poesio <poesio@cs.rochester.edu>

James Allen's _Natural Language Understanding_ published by Benjamin Cummings.

If you'd rather have it in PROLOG and you are mostly interested in parsing 
(i.e., not much semantics/reference interpretation/discourse etc.) I'd 
recommend either Gazdar/Mellish, _Natural Language in Prolog_, or 
Pereira/Shieber, more or less same title. 

All of the three books include code.
--
From:        Michael A. Covington <mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu>

The outstanding books are

Sparck Jones and Webber, Readings in NLP (Kaufmann)
  (collection of major journal articles -- actually a good
   way to start into the field)

major textbook by Allen

and you will of course want to read some general linguistics too;
the best intro. book is by Fromkin and Rodman.
--
From:      Espen J. Vestre <espen@coli.uni-sb.de>

Gazdar & Mellish: Natural Language Processing in Prolog*, Addison-Wesley 
1989.
Pereira & Shieber: Prolog and Natural Language Analysis, CSLI, Stanford 
1987.

*) there is a lisp version as well.

There is a gentle introduction to Computational Linguistics, 
"Computational linguistics - An introduction" by Ralph Grishman (Cambridge 
University Press 1986) which e.g. is used here for introductory courses.

Journals: Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, lots of 
Linguistic/Philosophical journals.
--
From:       Miles Osborne <miles@minster.york.ac.uk>

A good place to start looking is the Journal of Computational
Linguistics, and to a lesser extent Artifical Intelligence.
As for books, try Gazdar and Mellish's "Natural Language Processing
in Lisp", which contains many pointers into the field, along with
the obvious code fragments.
--
From:    Kathleen Pierco <kp@sunbim.be>

[I couldn't decide how to handle this one. Due to the nature of the response
 I didn't feel it would be proper netiquette to echo it to the net at large.
 Instead I will give a brief summary, and a contact for more information.]

BIM, a Belgian software company, has an english query system for relational
databases called "Loqui". Written in PROLOG, Loqui converts english queries 
into an intermediate language, and from there it can convert it to either
PROLOG or SQL. The possible availability of an evaluation license was also
mentioned. For more information, contact:

Dani De Ridder			
BIM				Tel:	+32 2 759 59 25
Kwikstraat 4			Fax:	+32 2 759 92 09
B - 3078 Everberg, BELGIUM	e-mail:	dani@sunbim.be

or their distributor in the US:

BIM Systems
Ms Kathi Rose
11111 Santa Monica Bld Suite 650
Los Angeles, CA 90025
Tel: +1 310 445 1500
Fax: +1 310 445 1515
e-mail: kr@bim.com	

-- 
  Alan Keahey     umkeahey@ccu.umanitoba.ca     (0x42<<1) || !(0x42<<1)
Newsgroups: comp.ai