Parsing

Syntactic parsing is the problem of mapping between a string of symbols and the hierarchical structure that generated the string.  Many approaches assume the symbols were generated using a Context-Free grammar (CFG). 

• Jurafsky and Martin, Part II gives an overview of the syntax of natural languages, context free grammars, and syntactic parsing.
• The Earley parser is a useful algorithm for parsing context-free languages.
• I also think it's worth understanding something about formal languages, and the relationship between regular languages and finite automata, and context-free languages and pushdown automata.