Data mining is a mature technology. The prediction problem, looking for predictive patterns in data, has been widely studied. Strong me- ods are available to the practitioner. These methods process structured numerical information, where uniform measurements are taken over a sample of data. Text is often described as unstructured information. So, it would seem, text and numerical data are different, requiring different methods. Or are they? In our view, a prediction problem can be solved by the same methods, whether the data are structured - merical measurements or unstructured text. Text and documents can be transformed into measured values, such as the presence or absence of words, and the same methods that have proven successful for pred- tive data mining can be applied to text. Yet, there are key differences. Evaluation techniques must be adapted to the chronological order of publication and to alternative measures of error. Because the data are documents, more specialized analytical methods may be preferred for text. Moreover, the methods must be modi?ed to accommodate very high dimensions: tens of thousands of words and documents. Still, the central themes are similar.

The Handbook of Natural Language Processing, Second Edition presents practical tools and techniques for implementing natural language processing in computer systems. Along with removing outdated material, this edition updates every chapter and expands the content to include emerging areas, such as sentiment analysis.

New to the Second Edition

• Greater prominence of statistical approaches
• New applications section
• Broader multilingual scope to include Asian and European languages, along with English
• An actively maintained wiki (http: //handbookofnlp.cse.unsw.edu.au) that provides online resources, supplementary information, and up-to-date developments

Divided into three sections, the book first surveys classical techniques, including both symbolic and empirical approaches. The second section focuses on statistical approaches in natural language processing. In the final section of the book, each chapter describes a particular class of application, from Chinese machine translation to information visualization to ontology construction to biomedical text mining. Fully updated with the latest developments in the field, this comprehensive, modern handbook emphasizes how to implement practical language processing tools in computational systems.

Data mining is a mature technology. The prediction problem, looking for predictive patterns in data, has been widely studied. Strong me- ods are available to the practitioner. These methods process structured numerical information, where uniform measurements are taken over a sample of data. Text is often described as unstructured information. So, it would seem, text and numerical data are different, requiring different methods. Or are they? In our view, a prediction problem can be solved by the same methods, whether the data are structured - merical measurements or unstructured text. Text and documents can be transformed into measured values, such as the presence or absence of words, and the same methods that have proven successful for pred- tive data mining can be applied to text. Yet, there are key differences. Evaluation techniques must be adapted to the chronological order of publication and to alternative measures of error. Because the data are documents, more specialized analytical methods may be preferred for text. Moreover, the methods must be modi?ed to accommodate very high dimensions: tens of thousands of words and documents. Still, the central themes are similar.