This book grew out of lecture notes for a course we started teaching at the Department of Computer Science at the Technion, Haifa, in the spring of 1996, and later also taught at the University of Haifa. The students were advanced undergraduates and graduates who had good knowledge of formal languages but limited background in linguistics. We intended it to be an introductory course in computational linguistics, but we wanted to focus on contemporary linguistic theories and the necessary mechanisms for reasoning about and implementing them, rather than on traditional (statistical, corpus-based) natural language processing (NLP) techniques.

We realized that no good textbook existed that covered the material we wanted to teach. Although quite a few good introductions to NLP exist, including Pereira and Shieber (1987), Gazdar and Mellish (1989), Covington (1994), Allen (1995), and more recently, Manning and Schütze (1999), Jurafsky and Martin (2000), and Bird et al. (2009), none of them provides the mathematical and computational infrastructure needed for our purposes.

The focus of this book is two dimensional. On one hand, we focus on a certain formalism, unification grammars, for presenting, studying, and reasoning about grammars. Although it is not the sole formalism used in computational linguistics, it has gained much popularity, and it now underlies many ongoing projects. On the other hand, we also focus on fundamental natural language syntactic constructions, and the way they are specified in grammars expressed in this formalism.