Over the last few years, we have led a series of tutorials and classes introducing the programming language Prolog by way of example programs that apply it to the problem of natural-language analysis and processing. This volume began as the notes for a tutorial taught by one of the authors, Pereira, at the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Chicago during July of 1985. During the fall of 1986, we organized a course at Stanford University on the same subject for which the original notes were extended.

This book is aimed at computer scientists and linguists at undergraduate, postgraduate, or faculty level, who have taken, or are concurrently taking, a programming course in Lisp. However, a good proportion of the book will also be useful to people with an interest in linguistics or natural language processing (NLP) but who do not have a computational background.

Research at the interface of logic, language, and computation has been
fruitful since the seventies. Indeed, the last few years have shown an
increasing interest is this field. Amongst the many contributions witnessing
this trend are the predecessors to this current volume: Dynamics,
Polarity, and Quantification, edited by Kanazawa and Pinon, and
Quantifiers, Deduction, and Context, edited by Kanazawa, Pinon, and
De Swart.

Following the tradition established in these volumes, this book pursues

he success of modern software for natural language processing impresses our imagination. Programs for orthography and grammar correction, information retrieval from document databases, and translation from one natural language into another, among others, are sold worldwide in millions of copies nowadays.