From the reviews: The topics covered are mostly related to acoustic and language modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR). ! I found the book very interesting. ! I would recommend it only to readers who are already familiar with statistical methods for language processing. I think that Mathematical Foundations of Speech and Language Processing is, nevertheless, a good reference about recent trends in the fields of ASR and language processing, which are indeed very relevant to current research in MT. (M. Federico, Machine Translation, Vol. 20, 2006)