Book excerpt: The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Volume I focuses on the progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and its increasing applications, including parsing, grammars, and search methods. The book first elaborates on AI, AI handbook and literature, problem representation, search methods, and sample search programs. The text then ponders on representation of knowledge, including survey of representation techniques and representation schemes. The manuscript explores understanding natural languages, as well as machine translation, grammars, parsing, test generation, and natural language processing systems. The book also takes a look at understanding spoken language, including systems architecture and the ARPA SUR projects. The text is a valuable source of information for computer science experts and researchers interested in pursuing further research in artificial intelligence.