ABSTRACT
The statistical approach to natural language processing (NLP) has become more and more important in recent years. This chapter gives an overview of some fundamental statistical techniques that have been widely used in different NLP tasks. Methods for statistical NLP mainly come from machine learning, which is a scientific discipline concerned with learning from data. That is, to extract information, discover patterns, predict missing information based on observed information, or more generally construct probabilistic models of the data. Machine learning techniques covered in this chapter can be divided into two types: supervised and unsupervised.
