What are good starting points for someone interested in natural language processing? [closed]

Answer 1

A very enjoyable readable introduction is The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. It goes into the Chomsky stuff and also tells interesting stories from the evolutionary biology angle. Might be worth starting with something like that before diving into Chomsky's papers and related work, if you're new to the subject.

Answer 2

One of the early explorers into NLP is Noam Chomsky; he wrote small books on the subject in the 50s through the 70s. You may find that engaging reading.

Answer 3

Cycorp have a short description of how their Cyc knowledge base derives meaning from sentences.

By utilising a massive knowledge base of common facts, the system can determine the most logical parse of a sentence.

Answer 4

You could try reading up a bit on phrase structured grammers, which is basically the mathematics behind much language processessing. It's actually not that heavy, being largely based on set and graph theory. I studied it many moons ago as part of a discrete math course, and I guess there are many good references available at this stage.

Edit:Not as much as I expected on google, although this one looks like a good learning source.