Having some background in statistics, but none in either linguistics or NLP, that book was a revelation. If you read, and implemented all the exercises in that book you'd find a way to make millions, as NLP is a big deal right now. I did find a little too much concentration on the low level stuff (character parsing, bag of words etc), but in conjunction with Elements of Statistical Learning its wonderful.
Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing complements ESL and Introduction to IR well by focusing on 'high-level' NLP, but its downside is that it focuses perhaps too much on linguistic terminology & theories instead of algorithms & implementations.
Having some background in statistics, but none in either linguistics or NLP, that book was a revelation. If you read, and implemented all the exercises in that book you'd find a way to make millions, as NLP is a big deal right now. I did find a little too much concentration on the low level stuff (character parsing, bag of words etc), but in conjunction with Elements of Statistical Learning its wonderful.