This book is a posthumous tribute to Margaret Masterman and the influence of her ideas and life on the development of the processing of language by computers, a part of what would now be called artificial intelligence. During her lifetime she did not publish a book, and this volume is intended to remedy that by reprinting some of her most influential papers, many of which never went beyond research memoranda from the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), which she founded and which became a major centre in that field. However, the style in which she wrote, and the originality of the structures she presented as the basis of language processing by machine, now require some commentary and explanation in places if they are to be accessible today, most particularly by relating them to more recent and more widely publicised work where closely related concepts occur.

In this volume, eleven of Margaret Masterman's papers are grouped by topic, and in a general order reflecting their intellectual development. Three are accompanied by a commentary by the editor where this was thought helpful plus a fourth with a commentary by Karen Spärck Jones, which she wrote when reissuing that particular paper and which is used by permission. The themes of the papers recur, and some of the commentaries touch on the content of a number of the papers.