Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Part I: Overview

Henning Wachsmuth
https://ai.uni-hannover.de

Introduction to NLP I Overview © Wachsmuth 2023 1

Outline of the course
I. Overview
• Introduction
• Applications
• Challenges
• Approaches

II. Basics of Linguistics

III. NLP using Rules
IV. NLP using Lexicons
V. Basics of Empirical Methods
VI. NLP using Regular Expressions
VII. NLP using Context-Free Grammars
VIII. NLP using Language Models
IX. Practical Issues

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Introduction
Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural language processing

• The study of computational methods for
understanding and generating human-
readable text (or speech)

https://wikimedia.org
We mostly speak about text only in this course.
• The goal is to decode structured information
from language, or to encode it in language.
• NLP is a subfield of AI, and one part of computational linguistics.

Computational linguistics
• Roughly, the intersection of computer science and linguistics
• Methods for tackling analysis and synthesis tasks from NLP
• Models to explain linguistic phenomena, using knowledge or statistics

Linguistics
• The study of natural language(s) in terms of form, meaning, and context
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Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Analysis and Synthesis

Types of NLP tasks

• Analysis. The decoding of structured information from text
• Synthesis. The encoding of (structured) information into text
Aka natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG)

Selected analysis tasks Selected synthesis tasks

• Token and sentence splitting • Lexicon creation
• Stemming and lemmatization • Free text generation
• Part-of-speech tagging • Sentence composition
• Constituency/Dependency parsing • Discourse composition
• Named/Numeric entity recognition • Spelling correction
• Reference resolution • Summarization
• Entity/Temporal relation extraction • Text style transfer
• Topic/Sentiment/Spam classification • Cluster labeling
• Text scoring/grading ... among many other tasks

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Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Example: Information Extraction

Task
• Identify entities, their attributes, and their relations in a given text
• Example. Extract company’s founding dates from a news article

Time entity Organization entity

“ 2014 ad revenues of Google are going to reach
Reference Time entity
$20B . The search company was founded in '98 .
Reference Time entity Founded relation
Its IPO followed in 2004 . [...] “

Output: Founded(''Google'', 1998)

Possible approach
1. Lexical and syntactic preprocessing
2. Named and numeric entity recognition
3. Reference resolution
4. Entity relation extraction
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Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Example: Language modeling

Task
• Extend a given text word by word until a suitable ending is reached.
• Example. Answer a user’s question to a chatbot

Possible approach
1. Train general language model on huge amounts of text examples
2. Fine-tune model on question-answer training pairs
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Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Terminology

Terms in NLP
• Task. A specific problem with a defined input and desired output
Examples: Constituency parsing, summarization, ...
• Technique. A general way of how to analyze and/or synthesize a text
Examples: Probabilistic parsing, language model, ...

• Algorithm. A specific implementation of a technique

Examples: CYK parsing, GPT-3, ...

• Model. The configuration of an algorithm resulting from training

Examples: CYK parsing on Penn Treebank, GPT-3 fine-tuned on a set of Q&A pairs, ...

• Approach. A computational method using model(s) to tackle a task

Example: A method that fines phrases based on CYK parsing, ...

• Method. May refer to an algorithm, model, and/or approach

Examples: As above

• Application. A technology that tackles a real-world problem using NLP

Example: Watson, ChatGPT, ...

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Applications
Applications

Applications

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• Software that employs NLP to solve real-world problems
• This includes tools, systems, web services, and similar.
The term application is also used in others ways in NLP.

Why applications?
• Automate or human tasks and/or improve over human performance
• Use cases: Writing assistance, text analytics, conversational AI, etc.

Examples
• Writing assistance. DeepL, Grammarly, Booking texts, Google Mail, ...
• Text Analytics. IBM Watson, Facebook Ads & Targeting, Apple Mail, ...
• Conversational AI. ChatGPT, Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, ...

Applications in this course

• The focus here is on computational methods rather than applications.
• Applications motivate why we deal with specific methods.
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Example Application: Watson

IBM Watson

https://en.wikipedia.org
• A technology for text analytics and decision support
• Originally: A focused question answering system
• First showcase was the “Jeopardy!” task

The IBM Challenge in 2011

• Watson plays against the best Jeopardy! champions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P18EdAKuC1U
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Example Application: Watson
Example “Question”

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Example Application: Watson
Watson’s “Answer”

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Example Application: Watson
NLP in Watson

Question answering process (simplified)

question candidate candidate answer
text analysis determination scoring text synthesis
Segmentation Content retrieval Evidence retrieval Result merging
Answer type Entity recognition Answer type slot Confidence
classification Relation detection filling computation
Entity recognition Entity and relation Entity scoring Answer ranking
transcribed textual
Relation detection matching Relation scoring Text generation
question answer
... ... ... ...

Search engines Expert systems

... ...

Large data sources

...

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Applications
Evolution of NLP Applications

Selected milestones
• February 2011. Watson wins Jeopardy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P18EdAKuC1U
• October 2011. Siri starts on the iPhone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUdVie_bRQo
• August 2014. Skype translates conversations in real time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuAp92wW9bg
• May 2018. Google Duplex makes phone call appointments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKVppdt_-B4
• February 2019. Project Debater competes in entire debates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJXcFtY9cWY
• November 2022. ChatGPT leads conversations on any topic
https://chat.openai.com

Observations
• NLP inside: All main analysis and synthesis tasks are tackled on text.
• None of these applications works perfectly.
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Challenges
Challenges

Levels of language
• Phonetics. Physical aspects of
speech sounds

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• Phonology. Linguistic sounds of a
particular language
• Morphology. Senseful components of words
• Syntax. Structural relationships between words, usually in a sentence
• Semantics. Meaning of single words and compositions of words
• Discourse. Composition of linguistic units larger than a sentence
• Pragmatics. Use of language to accomplish certain goals

Notice
• Phonetics and phonology are usually disregarded in NLP.
• Not all language phenomena clearly refer to one level, e.g., sentiment.
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Challenges
Ambiguity in Natural Language

Ambiguity
• Linguistic utterances allow for multiple interpretations.
• Fundamental challenge of processing natural language
• Pervasive across all language levels

Several types of ambiguity

• Phonetic. “wreck a nice beach”
• Word sense. “I went to the bank”.
• Part of speech. “I made her duck.”

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• Attachment. “I saw a man with a telescope.”
• Scope. “I didn’t buy a car.”
• Coordination. “If you love money problems show up.”
• Speech act. “Have you emptied the dishwasher?”
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Challenges
Missing Phonetics and Phonology

Purpose of “I never said she stole my money.”

I never said she stole my money. Someone else said it, but I didn’t.

I never said she stole my money. I simply didn’t ever say it.

I never said she stole my money. I might have implied it in some way.
But I never explicitly said it.

I never said she stole my money. I said someone took it.

But I didn’t say it was her.

I never said she stole my money. I just said she probably borrowed it.

I never said she stole my money. I said she stole someone else’s money.

I never said she stole my money . I said she stole something of mine.
But not my money.

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Challenges
Non-Standard Language

Colloquial language

(Felbo et al., EMNLP 2017)

• Non-standard writing. “@justinbieber Were
SOO PROUD of what youve accomplished!
U taught us 2 #neversaynever”
• Informal use. “This is sh*t” vs. “This is the sh*t”

Special phrases
• Tricky entities. “Let it Be was recorded”, “mutation of the for gene”, ...
• Idioms. “get cold feet”, “lose face”, ...
• Neologisms. “unfriend”, “retweet”, “hangry”, ...

Tricky segmentation
• Hyphens. “the New York-New Haven Railroad”
• Punctuation. “She was a Dr. I was not.”
• Whitespaces. “ ”, “Just.Do.It.”
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Challenges
Need for Context

World knowledge
• “Maja and Gabriella are sisters.” vs. “Maja and Gabriella are mothers.”
Do Maja and Gabriella belong to the same family?

• “I hope Trump will rethink capital punishment.”

Stance on death penalty? What location is it about? Is death penalty legal there?

Domain dependency
• “Read the book!”
Positive sentiment in a book review. Positive in a movie review?

Language dependency
• “Bad”
Sentiment in English? In German (means “bath”)? In French (does not exist)?
In Japanese (not even the characters exist)? ...

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Challenges
Practical Issues

Common practical issues

• NLP faces effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness issues in practice.
• How to deal with such issues will be discussed at the end of this course.

Effectiveness issues
• Effectiveness. The extent to which the output of a method is correct
• Methods may not be effective enough for use in real-life applications.

Efficiency issues
• Efficiency. The run-time, space, or energy consumption of a method
• Methods may not be efficient enough when applied to big text amounts.

Robustness issues
• Robustness. The effectiveness of a method across domains of text
• Methods may not be robust enough on data different from training data.
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Approaches
Approaches
Need for data
• NLP methods are meant to tackle specific analysis or synthesis tasks.
• To this end, they operationalize expert rules and/or statistical patterns.
• Rules and patterns are derived from analyses of training data.

Need for evaluation

• The output of NLP methods is rarely free of errors false
negatives
due to the outlined challenges. found true
positives
• Thus, they are evaluated empirically on test data. false correct
positives
• The effectiveness of the methods is quantified in
true
terms of metrics, such as accuracy. negatives

Need for comparison

• It is unclear how good a measured effectiveness in a given task is.
• Approaches are thus compared to other methods, so called baselines.

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Approaches
Text Corpora and Datasets

Text corpus

https://pixabay.com
• A collection of real-world texts with known properties,
compiled to study a language problem
• NLP methods are developed and tested on corpora.

Annotation
• An annotation marks a text or a span of text that represents an instance
of a particular type of information.
• Annotations represent meta-information about the marked parts.
• The texts in a corpus are often annotated for the problem to be studied.

Dataset
• A sub-corpus used for developing and/or evaluating methods.
• Typical: a training set for development, a validation set for evaluation
during development, and a test set for the final evaluation
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Approaches
Inference Techniques

Knowledge-based inference
• Inference is based on manually-encoded expert knowledge.
• Knowledge is represented by rules, lexicons, grammars, and similar.
We will see respective NLP techniques in the earlier part of this course.

Statistical inference
• Inference is based on statistical patterns found in training data.
• Patterns capture frequencies and/or manually-defined text features.
We will see first respective NLP techniques in the later part of this course.

Neural inference
• Inference is based on statistical patterns found in training data.
• Patterns are automatically encoded in neural networks.
Respective NLP techniques are treated in our master courses.

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Approaches
Inference Processes

Pipeline approach
• The default way to realize an inference process is in form of a pipeline.
• A pipeline sequentially applies a set of NLP algorithms to a given text.

Example: Pipeline for founding date extraction

input Sentence Tokenization Part-of-spech Phrase

text splitting tagging chunking

Time entity Named entity Reference Founded rela- founded

recognition recognition resolution tion detection relations

Alternatives
• Joint approach. Tackle multiple analysis/synthesis tasks simultaneously
• Neural approach. Operates on the raw input text (or tokens)
Even with these, some kind of pipeline is used for most inference processes.
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Approaches
Development and Evaluation

Input
• Task. An NLP task to be tackled
• Text corpus. A corpus, split into development and evaluation datasets

A typical development process

1. Analyze on training set how to best tackle the task.
2. Develop approach based on some technique that tackles the task.
3. Evaluate the effectiveness of the approach on the validation set.
4. Repeat steps 1–3 until performance cannot be improved anymore.
5. Evaluate the performance of the final approach on the test set.

Output
• Approach. An NLP approach that tackles the given task
• Results. Empirical effectiveness measurements of the approach

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Conclusion
Conclusion
Natural language processing
• Computational understanding and generation of text
• Analyses and syntheses at several language levels
• Disruptive applications such as conversational AI

Challenges
• Natural language is ambiguous in several ways
• Understanding requires context and world knowledge
• NLP aims to be effective, efficient, and robust

This course
• Teaches how to develop basic NLP methods input
text
Sentence
splitting
Tokenization Part-of-spech
tagging
Phrase
chunking

• Covers several tasks and techniques Time entity

recognition
Named entity
recognition
Reference
resolution
Founded rela-
tion detection
founded
relations

• Covers design, implementation, and evaluation

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References
Some content and examples taken from
• Emily M. Bender (2018). 100 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Semantics &
Pragmatics But Were Afraid to Ask. Tutorial at the 56th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), http://faculty.
washington.edu/ebender/papers/Bender-ACL2018-tutorial.pdf.
• Daniel Jurafsky and Christopher D. Manning (2016). Natural Language Processing.
Lecture slides from the Stanford Coursera course.
https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/NLPCourseraSlides.html.
• Matthias Hagen (2018). Natural Language Processing. Slides from the lecture at
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
https://studip.uni-halle.de/dispatch.php/course/details/index/
8b17eba74d69784964cdefc154bb8b95.
• Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin (2009). Speech and Language Processing: An
Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and
Computational Linguistics. Prentice-Hall, 2nd edition.
• Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze (1999). Foundations of Statistical
Natural Language Processing. MIT Press.
• Henning Wachsmuth (2015): Text Analysis Pipelines — Towards Ad-hoc Large-scale
Text Mining. LNCS 9383, Springer.

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