Natural Language

 

• [Rich and Knight1991] Artificial Intelligence, Chapters 14,15.
  Some basic ideas in natural language work, including context, lexical disambiguation and the syntax/semantics/pragmatics distinction.
• [Ginsberg1993] Essential of AI, Chapter 17 on Natural Language.
  An up-to-date chapter with good references at the end. You can skim the big ATN parsing example.
• [Barr and Feigenbaum1981] The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 1, Chapter 4.
  Sections A, C, D, F4, F5, F6.
  This reference covers some basic grammatical formalisms and parsing techniques. You should know about SHRDLU and MARGIE, and have a passing familiarity with SAM and PAM.
• [Barr and Feigenbaum1981] The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 1, Chapter 5.
  This chapter covers the major speech understanding projects undertaken during the 1970's. Understand the approaches employed in the different systems, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.

• [Winograd1980] What does it mean to understand language?
  Winograd calls into question the whole enterprise of natural language understanding, and describes how his own view on the matter has evolved over the years. A more detailed presentation of the ideas can be found in Computers and Cognition by Winograd and Flores.
• [Perrault and Grosz1988] Natural language interfaces .
  A survey of recent work on natural language interfaces to software systems. Sections 4 and 5 can be skimmed.