About the Authors

Breck Baldwin is the Founder and President of Alias-i/LingPipe. The company focuses on system building for customers, education for developers, and occasional forays into pure research. He has been building large-scale NLP systems since 1996. He enjoys telemark skiing and wrote DIY RC Airplanes from Scratch: The Brooklyn Aerodrome Bible for Hacking the Skies, McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics.

This book is dedicated to Peter Jackson, who hired me as a consultant for Westlaw, before I founded the company, and gave me the confidence to start it. He served on my advisory board until his untimely death, and I miss him terribly.

Fellow Aristotelian, Bob Carpenter, is the architect and developer behind the LingPipe API. It was his idea to make LingPipe open source, which opened many doors and led to this book.

Mitzi Morris has worked with us over the years and has been instrumental in our challenging NIH work, the author of tutorials, packages, and pitching in where it was needed.

Jeff Reynar was my office mate in graduate school when we hatched the idea of entering the MUC-6 competition, which was the prime mover for creation of the company; he now serves our advisory board.

Our volunteer reviewers deserve much credit; Doug Donahue and Rob Stupay were a big help. Packt Publishing reviewers made the book so much better; I thank Karthik Raghunathan, Altaf Rahman, and Kshitij Judah for their attention to detail and excellent questions and suggestions.

Our editors were the ever patient; Ruchita Bhansali who kept the chapters moving and provided excellent commentary, and Shiny Poojary, our thorough technical editor, who suffered so that you don't have to. Much thanks to both of you.

I could not have done this without my co-author, Krishna, who worked full-time and held up his side of the writing.

Many thanks to my wife, Karen, for her support throughout the book-writing process.

Krishna Dayanidhi has spent most of his professional career focusing on Natural Language Processing technologies. He has built diverse systems, from a natural dialog interface for cars to Question Answering systems at (different) Fortune 500 companies. He also confesses to building those automated speech systems for very large telecommunication companies. He's an avid runner and a decent cook.

I'd like to thank Bob Carpenter for answering many questions and for all his previous writings, including the tutorials and Javadocs that have informed and shaped this book. Thank you, Bob! I'd also like to thank my co-author, Breck, for convincing me to co-author this book and for tolerating all my quirks throughout the writing process.

I'd like to thank the reviewers, Karthik Raghunathan, Altaf Rahman, and Kshitij Judah, for providing essential feedback, which in some cases changed the entire recipe. Many thanks to Ruchita, our editor at Packt Publishing, for guiding, cajoling, and essentially making sure that this book actually came to be. Finally, thanks to Latha for her support, encouragement, and tolerance.