In the third edition the author has modernized the text, leaving the overview of traditional, theoretical, and computational linguistics, analytic philosophy of language, and mathematical complexity theory with their historical backgrounds intact. The format of the empirical analyses of English and German syntax and semantics has been adapted to current practice; and Chaps. 22–24 have been rewritten to focus more sharply on the construction of a talking robot.
Roland Hausser was Professor for Linguistische Informatik at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg and director of its Laboratory of Computational Linguistics Uni Erlangen (CLUE). Among his other publications are the books "A Computational Model of Natural Language Communication" and "Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots".