DR AF T Speech and Language Processing: An introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition. Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin. Copyright c⃝ 2006, All rights reserved. Draft of June 25, 2007. Do not cite without permission. 1 INTRODUCTION Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey This book is about a new interdisciplinary field variously called computer speech and language processing or human language technology or natural language pro- cessing or computational linguistics. The goal of this new field is to get computers to perform useful tasks involving human language, tasks like enabling human-machine communication, improving human-human communication, or simply doing useful pro- cessing of text or speech. One example of a useful such task is a conversational agent. The HAL 9000 com-CONVERSATIONALAGEN
