James Allen (9) (1950–)

Nice book, and the best in its day. Heavy on syntax for my taste (about half the book if I recall) but I'm more interested in semantics and knowledge representation anyway. And this is a textbook, so it ought to cover everything evenly: and it does.

I purchased this more at less at random when I was first investigating the field of natural language processing and haven't looked at it much since. The focus is on deterministic methods, e.g. parsing, unification, and semantic data structures. There is nothing about probabilistic methods. May be a decent reference for the non-stochastic side of things; I really haven't read enough to know.