Great Ground-Floor Intro. to an Important Topic
This is a seminal text in computational linguistics, written in a time when the computer was beginning to revolutionize the study of language, and the book-as-event is thus a milestone in the history of corpus linguistics, whose publication demarcates nicely the advent of terminology for "computational linguistics" from its precursor in "statistical linguistics."
I found this book vital in explaining simply-- as ground-breaking books are prone to do in a discipline-- the conceptual framework, the "why and wherefore" of the numerate, totalistic approach to texts. Other, perhaps more-modern books simply gloss over these basics, which are of course the prime and introductory material of this publication.
Simply put, this introductory book "introduces" in two ways: 1. it inaugurates and heralds a new discipline and approach to language-study to its FIRST audience-- and as such has not-insignificant historical merit; 2. to the SECOND audience in-- say-- the 21st century it invites one to examine the conceptual basis of computational linguistics as no more-modern book is wont to do, and does so in such a fundamental way that its reading provides clarity and transparency to a subject which perhaps by now has evidenced nuance, digression, and yea even "confusion-of-tongues."
