I’ve been immersed in NLP a bit lately. That’s not Neuro Linguistic Programming – though it does confusingly share the acronym (and is well worth a look for brain-hackers). No, this NLP is Natural Language Processing, a branch of computational linguistics that engages with automated parsing and tagging of human language.

Anyway, I was looking for something ideally very recent and came across the 2024 Springer textbook A Course in Natural Language Processing by Yannis Haralambous. It’s the book form of a course the author spent ten years perfecting. And it’s just what I needed – a step-by-step intro and history to NLP, situating it within the latest pivot to LLMs.

But what I didn’t expect was that it doubles as a brilliant ‘fundamentals of linguistics’ revision. The book targets students learning about NLP in a number of disciplines, not least linguistics. But since linguistics is part and parcel of language processing tech, there’s a whole section to get non-linguists up to speed. And it’s not just the basics. The author squeezes a ton of grad-level concepts into some brilliantly terse overview chapters.

Why should I get excited about this? Am I not ‘already’ a linguist? Well, I am… but a sidestepping one, having spent most of my professional life in language pedagogy. These chapters cover the material I studied in my taught masters, but revisiting them from time to time never hurts. Learning later in life things that colleagues learnt in their youth just needs a bit of neural retreading, and it’s great to come across a book that supports all that necessary pre-knowledge.

Anyway, A Course in Natural Language Processing is a great, up-to-date intro to NLP if you’re looking for one. And if your formal linguistics is a little rusty, you’ll get a bonus refresher into the bargain.