Introduction to Japanese Natural Language Processing

Hey, this is a book announcement, which I realize is a little thin on content for HN, but if anyone has any thoughts about what they'd like to see in the book we'd love to hear about it.

Masato and I are writing this to address what we see as a gap in Japanese-specific introductory NLP resources. There are a lot of great tools for Japanese NLP, but long time practictioners basically pick up knowhow along the way at some point, and beginners are confused by out of date documentation and tools that offer choices without explaining them.

Our goal with this book is to lay out why things are the way they are and explain why you need tools, what problems they solve (or don't), and how to make good use of the available tools, whether classics or recent innovations.

Especially for the English version of the book, we know there are people who will be interested, but we're not sure that they form a coherent community, so we'd be interested in hearing about what you'd want from a book like this, and what your position is that makes you interested. Are you an NLP researcher who wants to know more about Asian languages? Are you an engineer at a company with a multilingual site who needs to add Japanese support? Are you a CS student studying Japanese? There's definitely something we haven't imagined yet, and the more we know the better we can make the book.