Nitin Indurkhya is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is also the founder and president of Data-Miner Pty Ltd, which offers education, training, and consulting services in data/text analytics and human language technologies.Before his death, Fred J. Damerau was a researcher at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he worked on machine learning approaches to natural language processing.

… The need for a revised second edition of this book arose because of the growth of the field and the introduction of new methods. … The chapters have been exhaustively reviewed to maintain quality and homogeneity. The handbook has numerous diagrams and tables. The chapters are arranged so that they may be read independently. The style of presentation is good and the index is useful. Adequate references to current literature are provided. When compared to the previous edition, this edition focuses on statistical approaches, new and emerging applications, and multilingual scope, and has an actively maintained Wiki. Outdated chapters present in the first edition have been removed, and the remaining chapters have been rewritten and updated to reflect current trends and applications. When compared to other handbooks on NLP, this one is cheaper and certainly worth every penny. It provides a lot of useful information to those who are interested in NLP and its applications. … I highly recommend this handbook to practitioners of NLP as a very useful resource.—Computing Reviews, January 2011… the handbook covers the wide area of NLP and its applications. This will essentially help researchers and graduate students to access starting-point material for a particular area of interest. The handbook also covers the associated algorithms with examples which will help to develop prototype systems … a high quality compilation of up-to-date theories and applications of NLP.— Sandipan Dandapat… If you need a readable introduction to this important subject — this is it. … This is a good way to get into NLP. … this does provide a basic course on the subject suitable both for academic and practical development. Highly recommended.—Mike James, iProgrammer, 2010

• Classical Approaches. Empirical and Statistical Approaches. Applications. Index.