[disgruntledphd2]

Foundations of Statistical NLP is awesome.

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.

[amstr]

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.