I’ve been wondering about the reference books that other people are using.

When it comes to natural language processing and English grammar, I’ve found “Natural Language Understanding” by James Allen to be an indispensable reference. I’m using the second edition, published in 1994. ISBN-0-8053-0334-0

For more recent research I’ve also been able to find numerous papers published online, but I’ve yet to find anything that brings the entire field together with as much breadth and depth as the aforementioned book.

Does anyone else have any favorite books, research papers, or websites that they’d like to mention or recommend here?

The only reference material that I’ve used have been the various forums and websites that are devoted to AI and chatbots.  And among those, the one that I use most frequently is a great little forum site called chatbots.org. I also use Wikipedia to understand many of the new concepts and ideas that I learn from here, or other sources.

Good point about Wikipedia. It has many articles about linguistics and considerable detail. In fact, on some subjects it can be overwhelming and I have to read articles multiple times before they start to fit together. During the course of this research I’ve been gathering useful linguistic information on my website at wixml.net. The reference page in particular has many links back to Wikipedia which are my attempt to organise the information that I’ve found there in a way that makes sense to me. I put them all online in case other people find them useful too. http://wixml.net/reference.html

Hi guys!
Good news, bad news.

The good news: we’ve been working on our Research tab for more than one year. We’ve identified 143 relevant books (the book above is one of them). We’ve identified 239 relevant (academic) events. And we’ve identified more than 1000 academic journals in this area. Additionally, we’ll a very first attempt on showing some papers. Probably there will be more than 100.000 papers we need to research on relevance.

Bad news: this information is not live yet. However, we’ll soon publish it on this website. Probably in November. Members will be able to rate books on ‘relevance for this community’ and on ‘quality’.

Hopefully you have some time…
Erwin

Hi Erwin,

Thanks, I was kind of hoping this thread was going to provoke an admission from you along those lines.

Although I’ve been compiling wixml.net primarily for my own use, a part of me has always wondered if it would or could grow into something more like chatbots.org. However I’m a computer programmer/researcher first and foremost, so it’s a relief to find that somebody else such as your esteemed self has already taken on that task with a good deal more vigor and competence than I could muster. Thanks again.

Cheers,
Andrew

@Andrew: awesome link you’ve submitted, we posted synchronously.

You might be interested in one of the new projects after the research tab: Wiki. But actually I don’t want and wiki-wiki, but something which is more correlated. Additionally, it should be structured in such a way that the Chatbots.org chatbot (which doesn’t exists yet), has access and can use it in conversations about chatbots. So a chatbot who knows everything about chatbots based on a knowledge database completed by chatbot experts.

We really need to think about that. It will be truely interesting project, according to my opinion. What would you think?

Erwin, having Chatbots.org host a chatbot that knows all about chatbots is brilliant!

Actually it’s also so obvious that I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think of it myself.