Computational Modeling of Narrative:
Mani's book is quite useful as a broad review of the literature relating to computational narratology of text, providing, for literary theorists, a high-level treatment of the main technical approaches; and for technical readers a solid primer on narratological concepts, as well as a good survey that will serve as a jumping-off point for further reading.
-- Mark Finlayson in Natural Language Engineering (2014)
The monograph succeeds in carefully laying out essential issues in both fields of interest and in providing an excellent overview of current developments and trends...the monograph is a good source for computational linguists and others interested in text-to-sketch mappings of spatial and motion events and provides some well-grounded discussions of relevant and detailed problems and solutions.
-- Dorothea Hoffmann in Linguist List (2012)
The book is timely in its representation of the current understanding of motion concepts in language, and will therefore be of great interest in the computational and cognitive linguistics communities...the book is not only a valuable summary of the currently available tools for interpreting motion, but also a useful starting point for further research that aims to fill various gaps identified by Mani and Pustejovsky’s exploration of the field... Mani and Pustejovsky contribute to this urgently needed research by laying out the available tools in an accessible way and in many cases going several steps further ahead, suggesting mapping solutions wherever and to the extent possible.
-- Thora Tenbrink in Computational Linguistics (2013)
Summing up, this is a superb collection of primary material on how we talk about, reason about, and represent, temporal information. But it’s far more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to the editorial work that has gone into it, this book is a genuinely useful resource, one that will guide work in this domain over the next decade and more. It belongs on the bookshelf of any linguist, computer scientist, or logician interested in temporal reasoning. But most of all, it belongs on the shelf of any reader of this journal interested in the role that temporal information has to play in natural language processing.
- Patrick Blackburn in Computational Linguistics (2006)
Since this is the only textbook in its field, it will probably become required reading for new researchers, who will assume that it provides a full and balanced view...the book certainly provides a timely and informative overview of automatic summarization, and all researchers with an interest in this important field will wish to have it on their bookshelf.
--Chris Paice in Computational Linguistics (2002)
Mani thoroughly analyzes a diverse body of research and demonstrates its relevance to automatic text summarization, and he presents this information in an extended, or organized format. As a first step toward providing a systematic introduction to this increasingly important and rapidly evolving field, this book represents a valuable contribution to the literature.
--Shirley J. Linicum in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology, March 2002
Mani's stature in evaluation has been noted, so of all the parts of a summary of a summarization book, this is the most humbling. [….] There are not other obvious candidates for comparison as a textbook on automatic document summarization.
--Michael McQuaid in LINGUIST List: Vol-13-183, 2002