Errata for the book
A Course in Natural Language Processing
by Yannis Haralambous (Springer, 2024)



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 The Greek term for “Errata” is “Παροράματα,” a beautiful word, which has not found its way yet into the English language (see §4.7 on neoclassical compounds), even though it is composed of “παρά” (⸤against, despite⸥, as in “paradox” = ⸤against established knowledge⸥) and “ὅραμα” (⸤sight, vision⸥, as in “panoramic” = ⸤vision of everything⸥). The errors listed in this paroramatic section are entirely due to the author's lack of attention, for which he humbly apologizes. In the good ole days, when books were printed on paper only, an “Errata” sheet was inserted in each copy of the book, and the author still remembers his father finding every one of them and bluntly correcting the book before even starting to read it. This custom has been lost today, except in the form of Web pages like this one.

Erratum Magnum. All Chapters

All exercises in the book have been wrongly labeled. For example, Exercises 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, and 1-4, on pages 35-36, should have been labeled 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, and 2-4, since they are part of Chapter 2. As the same labels are used in the Hints section and on the Resources Website of the book, it is impossible to change them. Please make the following corrections:
  • Page 455, “16.1 Chapter 1” → “16.1 Chapter 2”
  • Page 459, “16.2 Chapter 2” → “16.2 Chapter 3”
  • Page 464, “16.3 Chapter 3” → “16.3 Chapter 4”
  • Page 469, “16.4 Chapter 4” → “16.4 Chapter 5”
  • Page 476, “16.5 Chapter 5” → “16.5 Chapter 6”
  • Page 478, “16.6 Chapter 6” → “16.6 Chapter 7”
  • Page 484, “16.7 Chapter 7” → “16.7 Chapter 8”
  • Page 489, “16.8 Chapter 8” → “16.8 Chapter 9”
  • Page 491, “16.9 Chapter 9” → “16.9 Chapter 10”
  • Page 499, “16.10 Chapter 10” → “16.10 Chapter 11”
  • Page 501, “16.11 Chapter 11” → “16.11 Chapter 12”
  • Page 509, “16.12 Chapter 12” → “16.12 Chapter 13”
  • Page 515, “16.13 Chapter 13” → “16.13 Chapter 14”

Chapter 4: Morphemes, Words, Terms

  • Page 66, §4.2. I forgot to mention that the definition of lexeme may vary from one branch of linguistics to the other. In psycholinguistics (e.g., Warren, Introducing Psycholinguistics, CUP, 2013), a “lexeme” is what we call a word, and a “lemma” is what we call a lexeme. Under these definitions, the sentence “lexemes can be inflected” is wrong as lexemes are always inflected, while lemmas are standard, uninflected forms of lexemes.
  • Page 66, §4.3, the first word of the paragraph is “The” and not “he.”

Chapter 9: Regular Languages

  • Pages 259–263. I forgot to thank Julien Romero, developper of the pyformlang package, who has developed an extension to context-free grammars especially for this book. Under stress, I stupidly forgot to use it, and I humbly apologize for that. I also forgot to quote the package, so please add the following reference on page 272:

    Julien Romero. “Pyformlang: An Educational Library for Formal Language Manipulation”. In: Proceedings of SIGCSE'21. ACM. 2021, p. 576–582. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3408877.3432464

Chapter 10: Logic

Please make the following correction:

  • Page 308, line –1 above formula (10.8): “then my answers will be answered” → “then my prayers will be answered”

This error can be interesting from a psycholinguistic point of view: read §4.10 and try to classify this type of error.

Chapter 12: Unicode

In fact Aeneas was not a general but an historian. He wrote a Treatise on Military Tactics. What is described by Polybius, in Histories 10.46, is the use of a 5-bit code for fire signals by King Philip V of Macedonia, inspired by Aeneas's Treatise. According to Polybius 10.45, the method was actually invented by Cleoxenus and Democlitus. The method is called “Polybius square.”

Chapter 13: XML, TEI, CDI

  • Page 370, line -9: replace profileDesic by profileDesc.

Chapter 16: Hints and Expected Results for Exercises

  • Page 511, last line before section title “Discussion of the result,” replace “Fig. 16.17 and 16.17” by “Fig. 16.17 and 16.18”?