Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
NLP Introduction
• Language is meant for Communicating about the world.
• By studying language, we can come to understand more
about the world.
• If we can succeed at building computational mode of
language, we will have a powerful tool for communicating
about the world.
• We look at how we can exploit knowledge about the world,
in combination with linguistic facts, to build computational
natural language systems.
• NLP problem can be divided into two tasks:
– Processing written text, using lexical, syntactic and
semantic knowledge of the language as well as the
required real world information.
– Processing spoken language, using all the information
needed above plus additional knowledge about
phonology as well as enough added information to
handle the further ambiguities that arise in speech.
Components of NLP
V S
PRO (RM3)
Want VP
NP
I
(RM2) V NP
PRO (RM4)
NP
print
to ADJS
ADJS N
(RM2)
Bill’s .init file
(RM5)
Discourse Integration
• Specifically we do not know whom the pronoun
“I” or the proper noun “Bill” refers to.
• To pin down these references requires an
appeal to a model of the current discourse
context, from which we can learn that the current
user is USER068 and that the only person
named “Bill” about whom we could be talking is
USER073.
• Once the correct referent for Bill is known, we
can also determine exactly which file is being
referred to.
Pragmatic Analysis
• The final step toward effective understanding is to decide
what to do as a results.
• One possible thing to do is to record what was said as a
fact and be done with it.
• For some sentences, whose intended effect is clearly
declarative, that is precisely correct thing to do.
• But for other sentences, including ths one, the intended
effect is different.
• We can discover this intended effect by applyling a set of
rules that characterize cooperative dialogues.
• The final step in pragmatic processing is to translate,
from the knowledge based representation to a command
to be executed by the system.
Summary
• Results of each of the main processes combine
to form a natural language system.
• All of the processes are important in a complete
natural language understanding system.
• Not all programs are written with exactly these
components.
• Sometimes two or more of them are collapsed.
• Doing that usually results in a system that is
easier to build for restricted subsets of English
but one that is harder to extend to wider
coverage.