Reviews (13)

I should need a little bit more
I have read the book at a stretch. In my view, the thesis (human is social) is a very simple, wit, and sound one. Maybe it is a very profound concern to us, whose complete consequences have not yet been taken in a serious consideration. Foundations and arguments in favor, coming from social and computer sciences, are orderly and properly unfolded along the book. The associated web page is being a very valuable resource for me. In short, I have made acquaintance with a good, satisfying mate. There is only a but for me: It has not moved me (but that is my but, not its...)

Good science; not metaphysics : know the difference; win big
You are most likely familiar with the story. In summary form, it is about a group of blind men standing around an elephant each declaring "what an elephant is like" based upon which part of the elephant they are touching -- and elephant is like: a wall (side); a tree trunk (leg); a hose (trunk); a fan (ear); and so on.
Good, but could have been more concise.
Swarm intelligence is burdened with an awful lot of material that is not core to PSO.A great deal of the book consists of the philosophical ramblings of the authors, rather than technical treatment of the topic at hand.An even larger chunk of the book was devoted to what was essentially a survey of AI: neural nets, evolutionary programming, heuristics, etc.Much too much space was devoted to grounding the reader in AI before proceeding.I must admit, however, that, while I found it out of place, the 'AI primer' part of the book is one of the most useful and lucid I have seen;I just think that it should have been a separate book (and this one should have been much thinner).The material that is specific to PSO is a very small fraction of the book, but is thorough and accessible;there really are few alternatives if one is particularly interested in PSO.However, if you are just interested in emergent behavior, and its applications to AI, take a look at Ant Colony Optimization (Dorigo).It covers ACO, rather than PSO, but is more more readable, and provides a much better technical treatment of the topic, if you want to avoid the philosophy and primer. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence    2. Artificial Intelligence - General    3. Computer Books: Languages    4. Computers    5. Computers - General Information    6. Distributed artificial intelli    7. Distributed artificial intelligence    8. Engineering - General    9. General    10. Swarm intelligence    11. Systems engineering    12. Computers / Computer Graphics / Design   

Reviews (5)

how to automatically extract an ontology?
The book shows progress in how ontologies are defined from various data sets. The subject is a natural field of artificial intelligence, in attempting to automated this filling of an ontology. Various example ontologies are presented, along with the markup languages like RDF and OWL in which these are expressed. The progress is visible, inasmuch as just a few years ago, these languages were devised. Now we see non-trivial ontology constructions using them. Good.
Excellent survey book on Ontology
The book is well organized in introducing the subject in a coherent manner and weaving in all important criteria of ontology together. I especially like to read the comparison of different languagees in light of knowlege represenation and knowlege reasoing.The book is great in terms of getting a broad view (survey) and is also great as a reference.In many pages, there is so much information packed in each sentences.Great book.

A good literature review of current developments
The word `ontology' is usually associated with philosophical speculation on the reality of things, and if one checks the literature on philosophy one will find a diverse number of opinions on this reality. Engineers and scientists typically view philosophical musings on any topic as being impractical, and indulging oneself in these musings will cause one to lose sight of the topic or problem at hand. Rather than simplify the problem and make it understandable, philosophy tends in most cases to complicate it by endless debate on definitions and the use of sophisticated rhetoric that seems to have no bearing on the problem at hand. The conceptual spaces generated by these debates can become gigantic and therefore unwieldy, thus making the problem appear more complex than it actually is.
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Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computer Books: General    3. Computer Science    4. Computers    5. Computers - General Information    6. Expert Systems    7. Expert systems (Computer scien    8. Expert systems (Computer science)    9. Knowledge Engineering    10. Knowledge management    11. Programming - Software Development    12. Semantic Web    13. Artificial intelligence    14. Computers / Expert Systems    15. Computers / Information Technology    16. Databases & data structures    17. domain ontology server    18. knowledge component    19. knowledge sharing and reuse    20. ontological engineering    21. ontology    22. ontology languages    23. ontology-based applications   

Reviews (18)

Needs a second volume which explains the first
This book is by now an accepted classic in the field.It is basically the only textbook that covers so much of computational linguistics, so I have had no choice but to use it for the past several years.Just the same, I'd rather not use it for teaching linguistics students.While the book has much to offer the professional, including a broad range of topics extensively researched, it is much more useful in this "handbook" capacity than as a textbook for the uninitiated.The chief reasons for this are: 1) It is pedagogically very poor; the majority of concepts are either explained in a confusing and obfuscatory manner or are not explained and are simply left in algorithmic form.This is not usually edifying to the linguistics student with no computer science background.2) There are too many mistakes in its algorithms and method overviews.So far as I can see, even the famed Earley parsing algorithm is wrong here, it will not yield the correct output.3) It is not written in a language that linguistics students can understand.With no background in mathematics, computer science, or pseudocode, such students need much more coddling than is provided by this book, and they are virtually unable to read it.Basically, as the title to this review states, what is called for now is a book to explain the contents of this book.Perhaps if my students keep encouraging me to write it. . .
I looked for
something which I can use - I am a linguist - and found it immensly readable and useful

The a good introduction to NLP, but could be improved
This book helped me accomplish what I set out to do; namely to obtain an overview of the field of natural language processing, with an emphasis on language understanding (as opposed to recognition). And I can recommend it on that level. The weakness of the book however is that it left me asking, "OK, now what?". The book started off strong with a number of dynamic-programming algorithms, finite automaton models, and N-grams that one could sink his/her teeth into from an algorithmic point-of-view. But when it came to actual techniques for natural-language understanding (chapters 14-17) the goods were not delivered. The algorithms disappeared, and the best I could find was in Chapter 15 an incomplete, and unconvincing treatment of Hiyan Alshawi's semantic parsing techniques which fueled the Core Language Engine last decade. Chapter 16 dealt with lexical semantics and was almost entirely devoid of algorithms. Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Automatic speech recognition    3. Computational Linguistics    4. Computer Books: General    5. Computer Vision    6. Language Arts & Disciplines    7. Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy    8. Linguistics    9. Audio processing: speech recognition & synthesis    10. Computers / Computer Vision    11. Machine learning    12. Natural language & machine translation   

Reviews (9)

Why is this the the best textbook on prolog?
Although this text is always mentioned in the same breath as other introductory textbooks on prolog, I don't think I've ever seen it described as "the best."
A respectable book from a respectable man
I remember contacting with Mr.Bratko via mail as I was a university student and I couldn't beleive that this book came from such a modest personality.
Great book for learning AI with Prolog, but....
... a horrible Prolog tutorial.Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence    2. Artificial Intelligence - General    3. Computer Books: General    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. Data processing    7. Programming - General    8. Programming Languages - Prolog    9. Prolog (Computer program langu    10. Prolog (Computer program language)    11. Prolog (Programming Language)    12. Computers / Programming Languages / General    13. Prolog   

Editorial Review

This collection of classic and ground-breaking papers explores the issues involved in information visualization--thought versus perception, mental process versus graphic representation. In Read more

Reviews (5)

I wish it had been available for purchase three years ago
If I would have been able to buy what basically amounts to a near comprehensive gathering of exactly the kind of research I've spent the past three years trying to find....I'd be a happer man with far more hair on my head. an oxy-moron
hey somebody ripped me off! INDISPENSIBLE SURVEY OF THE FRONTIERS OF INFOVIZ
Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, all extraordinary leaders in creating and researching the field on human-computer interface design, have pooled their editorial judgment to create a comprehensive, andmuch-needed collection of pioneering articles on information visualization. They have produced remarkable survey of such topics ascontext, mapping,spatial metaphors, interaction, navigation, and visual tools.Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computer Books: General    3. Computer Engineering    4. Computer Graphics    5. Computer Graphics - General    6. Computer Science    7. Computers    8. Computers - General Information    9. Digital Image Processing    10. General    11. Image processing    12. Information Theory    13. Information visualization    14. Computer graphics software    15. Computers / Computer Science    16. Human-computer interaction   

Reviews (2)

An excellent book too
This is actually a must-have book for those who want to study pattern recognition.

excellent tools for implementation of P.R. techniques
i first bought the book by Bishop (Neural Network for Pattern Recognition) and anyone who have read it can tell u how excellent that book is. This book has a little bit less theory and more on implementation which is perfect for me. This book include all the topics covered in Bishop and then some. How the book is organized, and how concise, easy to understand the material is at the same amazing level as Bishop's. I believe implementing and practicing things u learn is key to understanding them.. if you just look at how things are implemented, things would suddenly become 10 times clearer for you.. often to your own amazement (that you can actually understand all those stuff). this book is extremely useful even if u dont have matlab (just look up the syntax at mathworks web site), cuz matlab code is straightforward to understand. and the material included is very up to date and cutting edge indeed. i highly highly recommend it. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computer Books: Languages    3. Computer algorithms    4. Computers    5. Computers - General Information    6. Data Processing - General    7. Data Processing - Optical Data Processing    8. Data Transmission Systems - General    9. Digital Image Processing    10. Digital techniques    11. Image processing    12. Pattern Recognition    13. Pattern recognition systems    14. Algorithms    15. Algorithms & procedures    16. Computers / Artificial Intelligence    17. Neural Networks    18. Non-linear Statistics    19. Probability & statistics   

Reviews (5)

Before the invasion of the statisto-weenies, there was....
Last week, I was looking at the back flap of this book, and I saw something so shocking that I started choking on my pretzels!My wife, after slapping me on the back till I stopped choking, glanced down at the page--filled with bizzare symbols--and said, "How shocking could that page possibly be???"
A classic
Allen's book is a standard introduction to NLP in industry and academia.His exposition permits straightforward implementation and provides a lucid motivation for the algorithms he describes."Natural Language Understanding" was the first NLP text I read (for a summer job), and I've always referred to it first for its balance of formal and practical considerations. Now THERE'S a good book!
James Allen introduces the concepts required to build a NL system without losing you in the psycholinguistics, psychology and philosophy of language. The great part is that he gives you enough of a background in each of thesefields before going into a topic in depth. Plenty of examples help definewords like "morpheme" so you don't get lost in the psychobabblejargon of the required disciplines. (Wouldn't that be an ironic thing tohave happen in a NLP book?!) :) Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Artificial intelligence    3. Computer Books: General    4. Computers    5. Computers - Languages / Programming    6. Language and logic    7. Natural Language Processing    8. Natural Language Processing (Computer Science)    9. Programming Languages - General    10. Programming languages (Electro    11. Programming languages (Electronic computers)    12. Semantics    13. Computers / Natural Language Processing    14. Mathematical theory of computation    15. Natural language & machine translation   

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computer Books: General    3. Computers    4. Computers - General Information    5. General    6. AI logics    7. Artificial intelligence    8. Computers / Artificial Intelligence    9. algorithmic learning    10. computational intelligence    11. evolutionary computing    12. intelligent agents    13. intelligent information processing    14. knowledge processing    15. machine learning    16. natural language processing    17. neural computing   

Reviews (2)

Thorough coverage of MPI programming in Fortran, C, and C++
This book is an excellent introduction to programming with the MPI. It gradually introduces concepts from the simple to the complex. This is done with examples that illustrate the use of different techniques. The examples include the code to implement them. The programming examples alternate between Fortran 90, C, and C++. However, after giving the example in one language, the bindings for the MPI functions in the other two languages are presented. In addition, the programming examples in either language are easily understood. Although my first choice of programming language is Fortran (and I have very basic knowledge or C), I was able to follow the examples in C and C++ and to write their equivalents in Fortran so I could test them on our computers.

good reference but short on C examples
I liked the reference as an introduction to MPI, but it switched between fortran and C so often that I spent a fair amount of my time just trying to interpret the code samples and synchronize to the syntax of the languagethey were using.You shouldnt have that problem if you have used Fortranin the last ten years but i havnt touched it since college.You have to beable to work with both languages though because many of the key conceptsare only demonstrated in one language.Also the examples were usaullyspread out into mini snipets as opposed to a larger block that might show amore complete picture. ... Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computer Books: Languages    3. Computer Interfaces    4. Computer Science    5. Computers    6. Computers - Languages / Programming    7. Data Processing - Parallel Processing    8. Data Transmission Systems - General    9. Parallel Processing    10. Parallel computers    11. Parallel programming (Computer    12. Parallel programming (Computer science)    13. Programming    14. Programming - Parallel Programming    15. Computers / Computer Science    16. Networking packages   

Reviews (2)

Combined collection of science papers
After all this book seems to be just a combination of the science papers of Steve Mann. Those papers are great no offense but i had expected the book to be a bit more "readable". It has some additional content compared to the plain papers so its not senseless to buy it, if you have the money for it.
This book is the WORST book I have read in years...
Well, Before reading my comments take a look at the book itself....Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence    2. Artificial Intelligence - General    3. Computational intelligence    4. Computers    5. Data Transmission Systems - General    6. Digital Image Processing    7. Image processing    8. Imaging Systems    9. Science/Mathematics    10. Technology & Industrial Arts    11. Computer vision    12. Computers / General    13. Image processing: video   

Reviews (6)

A Confusing Book
For studying the speech recognition subject this is not the right book to buy, It is hard to understand the theory using this book.
very good book if you read its code
This book is composed of two parts, theory and implementation. if you only read its theoretical part, it is ok with many details missing. it is not clearly written. however, if you study its C++ code, you would get all you want on recognition system. I spent 3-8 hours everyday for 4 months going through its code line by line. The C++ code (30,000 lines in total) is very well written but without comments. Many times, I need to figure out things not written in the book. I once spent 1 week on 200 lines of code. However, After 4 months, I truely understand the system. Good Starter but Confusing.
I appreciated the balance between theory and implementation in the book.Also the content covers the most important topics.It is unfortunate that the book contains numerous typo's and confusing choices of symbols.The errors are often right in the most critical places too. The explanation of the theory of HMM's for example.0 and 1 are chosen to represent both white and black balls and 2 different urns all in the same diagram.When trying to sort out which is which the reader will be further confused by blatant errors where a 0 should be a 1.I am afraid many new readers will find frustration on the theory sections.Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Automatic Speech Recognition    3. C (Computer program language)    4. C (Programming Language)    5. Computer Books: General    6. Computers    7. Computers - General Information    8. Data Processing - General    9. Programming Languages - C++    10. Audio processing: speech recognition & synthesis    11. Communications engineering / telecommunications    12. Human-computer interaction    13. Technology / Telecommunications   

Reviews (1)

Simply Incomprehensible!
The author of this book may be a great logician, but he compunicates his ideas extremely badly, making this book agonisingly difficult to read.Read more

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence    2. Artificial Intelligence - General    3. Computer Books: General    4. Computers    5. Computers - General Information    6. Data processing    7. Logic, Symbolic and mathematic    8. Logic, Symbolic and mathematical    9. Prolog (Computer program langu    10. Prolog (Programming Language)    11. Reasoning    12. Computers / Artificial Intelligence    13. Prolog   

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Artificial intelligence    3. Computers    4. Computers - General Information    5. Expert Systems    6. Expert systems (Computer scien    7. Expert systems (Computer science)    8. Information Theory    9. Knowledge representation (Info    10. Knowledge representation (Information theory)    11. Philosophy    12. Programming - General    13. Programming Languages - General    14. Computers / Programming Languages / General    15. Mathematical theory of computation   

Reviews (13)

The book has its values, but also got serious problems
Most of other reviewer think highly of this book. I also agree, to a certain extent, that the book's is valuable and fill in the gap between "talks" and "walks".
Great second edition of an applied book on AI
Scientists started the field of AI research in the 1950's with the now largely failed quest to produce machines that think. However, they did open the door to making improved individual products that can "learn" how to do their limited jobs better, and they also opened the door to the use of AI in games and in recommender systems such as you see here on Amazon.
GREAT text for "real world" developers who want more from their apps
One of the major reasons I wrote, "Building Intelligent .NET Applications" was the inspiration I received from reading the first edition of M. Tim Jones book titled, "AI Application Programming". It was the first book I had ever come across that presented AI Programming in a way that professional developers like me could easily absorb. So, I was thrilled when I saw that in 2005, Mr. Jones had released a second edition of his excellent book.
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Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Artificial intelligence    3. Computer Books: Languages    4. Computers    5. Computers - General Information    6. Data processing    7. Mathematical models    8. Programming - Software Development    9. Programming Languages - C    10. C & Visual C    11. Software engineering   

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Automation    3. Computer Vision    4. Control systems    5. Engineering - Mechanical    6. General    7. Medical / Nursing    8. Robot vision    9. Robotics    10. Robots    11. Science/Mathematics    12. Technology    13. Computers / Computer Graphics / General    14. Image processing: graphics (static images)    15. algorithmic learning    16. autonomous agents    17. camera-equiped robots    18. cognitive systems    19. intelligent agents    20. machine learning    21. mobile robots    22. object recognition    23. robot navigation    24. robust control   

Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computational linguistics    3. Computer Books: General    4. Computer Books: Operating Systems    5. Computers    6. Congresses    7. Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy    8. Linguistics    9. Linguistics (General)    10. Natural Language Processing (Computer Science)    11. Computers / Artificial Intelligence    12. Computers-Artificial Intelligence - General    13. Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics    14. Natural language & machine translation   

Reviews (1)

Great Resource For The Seriously Interested
This book is written, chapter by chapter, by many of the most important researchers in this field- Since it is an advanced text, the content is a bit uneven and varied in writing style- It is essentially a compendium of review articles by experienced researches covering the various facets of the DL community. The choppy design is a small tradeoff for being able to get some very up-to-date information on Description Logics.
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Subjects:  1. Computer Books: General    2. Computer Books: Languages    3. Computers    4. Computers - General Information    5. Description logics    6. Expert Systems    7. Handbooks, manuals, etc    8. Programming - Software Development    9. Programming Languages - General    10. Artificial intelligence    11. Computers / Programming / Software Development    12. Mathematical logic    13. Mathematical theory of computation   

Reviews (1)

This book is going to be a classic !!
This is a wonderful, code rich, book on language processing for computational linguists and language engineers. It is both theory and example rich with considerable detail throughout. The book is clearly written and very well structured!!
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Subjects:  1. Artificial Intelligence - General    2. Computer Books: General    3. Computers    4. Computers - General Information    5. Natural Language Processing    6. Programming - General    7. Programming Languages - Perl    8. Programming Languages - Prolog    9. Computational linguistics    10. Computers / Artificial Intelligence    11. Natural-language processing    12. Parsing    13. Perl    14. Prolog    15. Semantics    16. Syntax    17. Tagging   

Subjects:  1. Communication    2. Computational linguistics    3. Language    4. Language Arts & Disciplines    5. Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy    6. Linguistics    7. Natural Language Processing (Computer Science)    8. Natural language processing (C    9. Language Arts & Disciplines / Communication    10. Natural language & machine translation   

Reviews (3)

Organized and well-written
This book is an essentially non-mathematical descriptive overview of computational linguistics that emphasizes an historical viewpoint. It is very understandable, even for someone approaching the subject for the first time. In addition, it could be used as a textbook as there are a large set of exercises at the end of each chapter. Computational linguistics has been applied to biological sequence analysis, which was my primary reason for reading the book.