GENERAL IDEA: Broad coverage but it lacks depth and details - particularly practical details. That is, the presentation is often too sketchy, mainly because it approaches too many subjects for its available space. I would not say that this book is strong on theory either. It is quite obvious that it avoids getting too formal and rigurous, probably to remain attractive for non-specialists too.

CASE STUDY: One specific problem I had with the Hidden Markov Models, that are supperficially presented (or spread I could say) in several separate sections of the book, so it's not been a pleasure trying to actually understand them properly and completely as a fundamental concept, to make them work in my particular application.

TITLE: The book's title IS misleading because it starts with "Speeech" and this book's main subject is not speech but (written) language. Actually there are only a few chapters on speech.

CONCLUSION: Get this book if you are looking for a good overview of the field. As soon as you need in-depth coverage of some particular topic you will look for additional resources.

The book showcases a comprehensive and user-friendly approach to cover the leading research in the field of Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition. It mingles theories and applications to demonstrate the full developmental cycle of computational aspect of NLP. It is a MUST-have for those who can afford only one book but desire to learn virtually aspects of computational linguistics.

This book is a feat for anybody interested in Natural Language Processing and probably the most comprehensive book on this subject. It provides an in-depth overview of the most important aspects of NLP from regular expressions to sense disambiguation, discourse, and machine translation. I particularly like the bibliographical and historical notes in each chapter, which provide additional historical context and lots of references.

The book is well written and carefully structured. However, it contains several silly typos (real-word errors) that are a bit embarrassing, considering the topic of the book.

This book does not cover the hardware components of speech recognition. It only provides an introduction to the computational aspects. Nevertheless, I don't think the title is misleading (as other reviewers claim), but the back-cover should mention that it doesn't cover the electronic and signal processing components of speech recognition.