These two books are really recommended: - Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky and Martin - Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Chris

These two books are really recommended: - Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky and Martin - Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Chris Manning and Hinrich Schütze Together they provide a very good overview of the field, from tokenization to robust parsing. I cannot really recommend one library. The last two years, I have been working on a parsing/generation system that was developed in our research group (Alpino). We use very little external software (only for maximum entropy model parameter estimation and building finite state automata). We use Prolog, because it is ideal for writing unification grammars and C/C++ for components that Prolog is not well-fit for (part of speech tagger for lexical restriction, finite state automata, term compression, language models, etc.). This system is amongst others used for extracting syntactic structure for question answering (based on e.g. Wikipedia data and newspaper texts).