Computers and Written Texts

Assuming no prior familiarity with the field, this book provides an introductory survey of the computational study of written texts. It brings together two aspects of computational linguistics normally considered quite separate but which are beginning to develop important links: AI-based work in natural language processing and traditional studies based on indexing and concordance techniques. Following an initial survey of tools and techniques for text processing, the book reviews the principles and current state of automated parsing, natural language generation and machine translation. It considers the growing use of extensive computer-readable corpora of text and the use of such corpora and of the computation techniques in dictionary compilation. The book examines also the computational analysis of literary style and authorship and the use of computational techniques in the editing of scholarly texts. The final two chapters turn to practical applications of computers in language teaching and in aiding writers improve written texts. Each chapter is designed to take the reader from first principles to to a good understanding of the present state of the art.