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

歐仁·查尼阿剋（Eugene Charniak），美國布朗大學計算機科學係教授兼係主任。

鬍鳳國，中國傳媒大學文學院副教授。

馮誌偉，計算語言學傢，專門從事語言學和計算機科學的跨學科研究，現為國傢教育部語言文字應用研究所研究員、博士生導師、學術委員會委員。