Natural Language Processing

Definition

"Natural Language Processing is a theoretically motivated range of computational techniques for analyzing and representing naturally occurring texts at one or more levels of linguistic analysis for the purpose of achieving human-like language processing for a range of tasks or applications" [1].

Goal

"The goal of NLP as stated above is “to accomplish human-like language processing”. The choice of the word ‘processing’ is very deliberate, and should not be replaced with ‘understanding’. For although the field of NLP was originally referred to as Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in the early days of AI, it is well agreed today that while the goal of NLP is true NLU, that goal has not yet been accomplished. A full NLU System would be able to:

1. Paraphrase an input text.
2. Translate the text into another language.
3. Answer questions about the contents of the text.
4. Draw inferences from the text.

While NLP has made serious inroads into accomplishing goals 1 to 3, the fact that NLP systems cannot, of themselves, draw inferences from text, NLU still remains the goal of NLP Natural Language Processing, 2.

Location of Field

"NLP has significant overlap with the field of computational linguistics, and is often considered a sub-field of artificial intelligence" [2].

Related Reading

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational Linguistics

External Links

• Lecture - 39 Natural Language Processing - I
• Natural Language Processing Liddy, E. D. In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 2nd Ed. Marcel Decker, Inc.
• Natural Language: Understanding & Generating Text & Speech
• Natural Language Processing Research Group at the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science
• What is Computational Linguistics? Hans Uszkoreit, CL Department, University of the Saarland, Germany. 2000. A short, non-technical overview of this exciting field.
• The Redmond-based Natural Language Processing group
• The Stanford NLP Group