Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing
Statistical natural-language processing is, in my estimation, one of the most fast-moving and exciting areas of computer science these days. Anyone who wants to learn this field would be well advised to get this book. For that matter, the same goes for anyone who is already in the field. I know that it is going to be one of the most well-thumbed books on my bookshelf.(Eugene Charniak, Department of Computer Science, Brown University)