Peter Norvig review of "Foundations of Statistical NLP"

There are lots of books (and even more junk email) with titles like "Get Rich Quick". On the surface, this book is the exact opposite: a scholarly, scientific text aimed at comprehensive, accurate description, not at commercial hype. But if someone told me I had to make a million bucks in one year, and I could only refer to one book to do it, I'd grab a copy of this book and start a web text-processing company. Your return on investment might not be $1M, but this book delivers everything it promises. For all the major practical applications of statistical text processing, this book accurately and clearly surveys the major techniques. It often has pretty good advice about which techniques to prefer, but sometimes reads more like a catalog of listings (this reflects not on the authors' failing, but rather on the field's immaturity). It's worth comparing this book to the other recent NLP text: Jurafsky and Martin's. (Disclaimer: I worked with them on the preparation of their text.) Jurafsky and Martin cover much more ground, including many aspects that are ignored by Manning and Schutze. So if you want a general overview of natural language, if you want to know about the syntax of English, or the intricacies of dialog, then Jurafsky and Martin is for you. But if your needs are more focused on the algorithms for lower-level text processing with statistical techniques, then Manning and Schutze is far more comprehensive. If you're a serious student or professional in NLP, you just have to have both.