Presents a practical introduction to the processing of natural language by computer. The subject is approached through the discussion and development of various computer programs which illustrate basic concepts and techniques in the field. The programming language used, Prolog, is especially well-suited for natural language procesing and for those with no previous background in computing. From an early stage, the text will help those with no expereince in programming to produce simple, yet effective, programs using Prolog that will be capable of analysing sentences in English. The main emphasis is on syntactic processing and the reader is led through gradually more complex techniques as diferent approaches to parsing are examined.