[syllogism]

There's no alternative NLP book I can really recommend, no --- sorry. It's moving too fast, the books are going out of date too quickly.

You could try Hal Daume's blog, and Bob Carpenter's blog.

[sitkack]

Here is a review [0] by Bob Carpenter of Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing [1].

[0] http://www.amazon.com/review/R2FUAZHGUOERHV

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Statistical-Natural-Langua...

[syllogism]

I know that book well. It's too dated.