NLP Simple Explanation
NLP Simple Explanation
Examples:
NLP involves several phases of analysis to understand and process human
language. Here’s a simple breakdown with real-time examples:
3. Stopword Removal
Removes common words (e.g., "the," "is," "and") that add little meaning.
Example:
o Input: "The cat sat on the mat."
o Output: "cat sat mat"
4. Stemming
Reduces words to their root form by cutting off prefixes/suffixes (may not always be correct).
Example:
o Input: "running, runs, ran"
o Output: "run, run, run"
NLP involves multiple levels of analysis, each focusing on different aspects of language understanding. These levels help
computers process human language systematically.
2. Morphological Level
Focus: Structure of words (prefixes, suffixes, root words).
Example:
o Breaking "unhappiness" → "un" (prefix) + "happy" (root) + "ness" (suffix).
Key Concepts
1. Hidden Markov Model (HMM)
o A statistical model where:
Observations are visible (e.g., words in a sentence).
Hidden states are unknown (e.g., part-of-speech tags).
o Defined by:
Transition probabilities (between hidden states).
Emission probabilities (probability of observations given states).
2. Goal of Viterbi Algorithm
o Find the optimal sequence of hidden states that best explains the observed data.
Rule-Based Tagging
Uses handcrafted linguistic rules
Example: "If word ends with '-ing', tag as VBG"
Pros: Transparent, works well for regular patterns
Cons: Labor-intensive, can't handle ambiguity well
Key Components:
1. Lexical Entries: Words/phrases with linguistic properties (e.g., "dog" = noun).
2. Relation Types: Predefined categories (e.g., synonymy, antonymy).
3. Metadata: Additional info (e.g., word frequency, part-of-speech).
Common Lexical Relations
Conclusion
A Database of Lexical Relations formalizes word connections, bridging human language and
machine understanding. Tools like WordNet power:
✅ Thesauri
✅ Grammar checkers
✅ AI language models
By structuring vocabulary into relational networks, these databases enable nuanced NLP
applications.