I currently work at NLP software company in South Korea as an NLU software developer.When I bought this book, I was finishing my own MT decoder and starting tobuild a rudimentary IBM word alignment model trainer.This book greatly contributed to the project in that it deeply corrected my wrong understanding ofmany concepts such as dynamic programming, optimization, beam search, and etc.Best part : It includes easy-to-understand pseudo-code for IBM 1~5 word alignment process.It was also helpful in improving the performance of existing decoder.As one of the leading figures in well-known Moses project and Euro Matrix,author's explanation is firmly grounded upon practical experience andincludes a lot of elements required for building a prototype MT system.I believe reading this book with the background knowledgethat you can learn in such books as Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach or Mitchell's Machine Learning,may maximize your learning rate, since the subject stuffs inthese books are highly inter-related with each others,for example, unsupervised learning algorithm(especially EM),optimization and search.This book is top-ranked in NLP category of my personal book shelf.I guess you won't regret if you purchase one.