This book grew out of a course that was offered for the first time in the winter quarter of 2004 at the Ohio State University (OSU): Linguistics 384, Language and Computers. A special thanks to the chair of the Department of Linguistics at the time, Peter Culicover, as well as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Linguistics, Beth Hume, for having the foresight to recognize the potential for such a course and supporting its development and approval as a general education requirement course at OSU.
There would not be a book were it not for Danielle Descoteaux, who heard about the course and our ideas to turn it into a book and encouraged us to realize this with Wiley-Blackwell. Her sustained enthusiasm for the project made sure we stayed on the ball. We are also very grateful to our project editor Julia Kirk, who continued to be supportive and friendly despite our slow progress.
Drafts of this book benefited significantly from feedback on the course at OSU, as well as similar courses taught at Georgetown University (GU) and Indiana University (IU). The instructors shared many good ideas and pointers to relevant materials, for which we would like to thank particularly Stacey Bailey, Xiaofei Lu (who also provided the Chinese characters for this book), Anna Feldman, DJ Hovermale, Jon Dehdari, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar, Michael White, Sandra Kübler, Ross Israel, and the computational linguistics community at our universities for encouragement and neat ideas for the course and book. Thanks also to Lwin Moe for providing figures of the Burmese writing system; to Tony Meyer and Ayelet Weiss for help on the Hebrew examples; and to Wes Collins for providing Mam examples in chapter 7.
We wish to specially acknowledge Jason Baldridge at the University of Texas, who has continually tested book chapters, provided insightful suggestions for the book and associated courses, and diligently encouraged us to get the book completed.
While it would take too long to name them individually, the students at OSU, GU, and IU who took these courses have been a joy to teach, and their feedback on particular exercises and requests for clarifications on material have definitely made the book better.
A number of people read drafts or partial drafts and provided useful comments. Thanks to Amber Smith for her comments and discussion on integrating the book material into a real course, to Johannes Widmann for his comments on the Language Tutoring Systems chapter, and Keelan Evanini and Michael Heilman at Educational Testing Service (ETS) for extensive and extremely helpful comments on every aspect of the book, from the structure of the chapters through the best way to talk about neural networks to correcting typographical mistakes (including the especially awkward ones in the sentences advocating the use of spell checkers). Sheena Phillips, Jason Quinley, and Christl Glauder also helped us improve the book by carefully proofreading the final version - thanks!
Speaking individually, Markus Dickinson would like to thank Stephanie Dickinson for her encouragement and support during the last few years of this project, and also for her willingness to discuss specificity, sensitivity, and other classification metrics at the dinner table. Lynn Weddle deserves credit for responding to a Facebook post and suggesting Bart and Lisa Simpson for an example in the Searching chapter – although she had no idea it had to do with a book or would lead to an acknowledgment.
Chris Brew thanks Sheena Phillips for everything, and specifically for being exactly the right person to answer the question: “Is this too British?” Matthew and Jamie Brew gave helpful advice on the design of the cover, pointing out things that the older generation just did not see.
Detmar Meurers would like to thank Markus and Chris for the excellent collaboration and being such reliable colleagues and friends, Walter Meurers for emphasizing the importance of connecting research issues with the real world, and Kordula De Kuthy, Marius, Dario, and Cora for being around to remind him that life has a meaning beyond deadlines.