Natural Language Processing

Goals of NLP
 Build Intelligent Computer Systems:
– Database Interfaces
– Translation to Different Languages
– Summarization
– Automate Services
– Natural Language interface for Operating
systems
 Goals of NLP
– Classify documents according to Context
– Speech Processing
– Speech Recognition
– Intelligent Computer as friend
– Etc.
 What is NLP
 Study of ;
– Getting Computer to Understand Language
– Can Computers “Understand”?
– Limitation of Computer in understanding the Natural
Language
 How do People;
– Answer Questions
– Summarize
– Translate in different Language
– Learn
 What is NLP
“Study of Making such machines, which can
understand the speakers Goal, context of the
interaction & act on the statements (Spoken
or Written) in any defined Natural
Language”
Which Requires;
Dictionary, Grammar Rules, Analysis of the
Context/Words/Suffix/Affix etc.
Analysis of Natural Languages
 Prosody
 Phonology
 Morphology
 Syntax
Varies as the recognition of sounds or
 Semantics
printed text, communication of emotional
 Pragmatics Context through rhythm and inflection
 World Knowledge
 Prosody
 Deals with the rhythm and intonation of
language. This Level of analysis is difficult
to formalize and often neglected.
 In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress,
and intonation of speech.
 Prosody may reflect various features of the
speaker or the utterance: the emotional state
of the speaker etc.
 Phonology
 Examines the sounds that are combined to
form language. This branch of linguistics is
important for computerized speech
recognition and generation
 Sounds of language
 Morphology
 Is concerned with the components that
make up words. These include the rules
governing the formation of words, such as
the effect of prefixes (un-, non-, anti-, etc)
and suffixes (-ing, ly etc) that modify the
meaning of the root words. Morphological
analysis is important in determining the role
of a word in a sentence, including its tense
and part of speech.
 Syntax
 Studies the rules for combining the words
into legal phrases and sentences, and the
use of those rules to parse and generate
sentences. This is the best formalized and
thus the most successfully automated
component of linguistic analysis.
 Semantics
 Considers the meaning of words, phrases
and sentences and the ways in which
meaning is conveyed in natural Language
expressions.
 Pragmatics
 Is the study of the ways in which language
is used and its effects on the listener. For
example, pragmatics would address the
reason why, “Yes” is usually an
inapproriate answer to question “Do you
Know what time it is?”
 World Knowledge
 Includes Knowledge of the Physical World,
The World of human Social Interaction, and
the role of goals and intentions in
communication. This general Background
knowledge is essential to understand the full
meaning of text or conversation.
Parse Trees
 Issues
 Categorial ambiguity
– More than one terminal symbol for a word
eg. "Time flies like an arrow"

 Ellipsis
– part of a sentence is missing
eg. Italy was beating England.

 Global ambiguity
This means that the whole sentence can
have more than 1 interpretation.
Example:
"I know more intelligent persons than
Newton"

“who does more intelligent persons

refer to?”
 Local Ambiguity
This means that part of a sentence can
have more than 1 interpretation, but not
the whole sentence.

Example:
"I know more intelligent persons than
john, although he knows quite a lot."
 Issues
 Word sense ambiguity
– Word has one terminal symbol but can refer to
different concepts
"I saw her run to the bank"

– Without other sentences included in our analysis,

we cannot know if it is a money or earth bank.
We might use frequency of use if we had such
data.
 NLP Applications
Applications can be classified in different
ways:
e.g. medium/modality; depth of analysis;
degree of interaction.
 Text-based Applications
 Dialogue-based
 NLP Applications

 Spellings & grammar checkers

 Spoken language control system
 Automatic message understanding
and classification systems
 Machine translation tools