1   Websites with Information on Natural Language Processing

Several websites have useful information about NLP, including conferences, resources, and special-interest groups, e.g. www.lt-world.org, www.aclweb.org, www.elsnet.org.

The website of the Association for Computational Linguistics, at www.aclweb.org, contains an overview of computational linguistics, including copies of introductory chapters from recent textbooks. Wikipedia has entries for NLP and its subfields (but don't confuse natural language processing with the other NLP: neuro-linguistic programming).

http://www.statmt.org/

http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Textual_Entailment_Resource_Pool

2   NLP Systems with Online Interfaces

Several NLP systems have online interfaces that you might like to experiment with, e.g.:

• WordNet: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
• Translation: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/, http://translate.google.com/
• ChatterBots: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
• Question Answering: http://www.answerbus.com/
• Summarization: http://newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu/

Online concordancing:

• http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/internet.html

3   Python

A good starting place: http://www.python.org/doc/intros/

(Rossum & Drake, 2006) is a Python tutorial by Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python and Fred Drake, the official editor of the Python documentation. It is available online at http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html. A more detailed but still introductory text is (Lutz & Ascher, 2003), which covers the essential features of Python, and also provides an overview of the standard libraries. A more advanced text, (Rossum & Drake, 2006) is the official reference for the Python language itself, and describes the syntax of Python and its built-in datatypes in depth. It is also available online at http://docs.python.org/ref/ref.html. (Beazley, 2006) is a succinct reference book; although not suitable as an introduction to Python, it is an excellent resource for intermediate and advanced programmers. Finally, it is always worth checking the official Python Documentation at http://docs.python.org/.

Two freely available online texts are the following:

• Josh Cogliati, Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non-Programmer's_Tutorial_for_Python/Contents
• Jeffrey Elkner, Allen B. Downey and Chris Meyers, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python (Second Edition), http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/