Aimed at those interested in AI, software engineering, linguistics, statistics and computer science, this book covers the area of computational linguistics, which underpins the technology for communication between humans and computers. The book approaches the subject from different angles showing various techniques in action. These are practical in nature and have been developed in widely used languaues available on personal computers (C and Prolog) so that readers can experiment and develop their own applications. The aim is to achieve natural language output from a database. Three case studies illustrate the techniques, and one contributed chapter puts the book into a philosophical setting. Two appendices are included which contain program code for the various tools, together with implementation notes for users of particular mahines and compilers.