CMIS 4114 Index : 122139

Natural Language
Processing
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INTRODUCTION

• What is Natural Language Processing

• NLP for machines
• Why NLP
• History of NLP
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What is natural language
processing?
• Process information contained in natural
language text
• Also known as Computational Linguistics (CL),
Human Language Technology (HLT), Natural
Language Engineering (NLE)

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NLP for machines…
• Analyze, understand and generate human languages just like
humans do
• Applying computational techniques to language domain
• To explain linguistic theories, to use the theories to build
systems that can be of social use
• Started off as a branch of Artificial Intelligence
• Borrows from Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Science
& Statistics
• Make computers learn our language rather than we learn
theirs 5
Why NLP?
• A hallmark of human intelligence
• Text is the largest repository of human knowledge and is
growing quickly
• computer programmes that understood text or speech

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History of NLP
• In 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Machine and
Intelligence" which advertised what is now called the Turing
test as a subfield of intelligence
• Some beneficial and successful Natural language systems were
developed in the 1960s were SHRDLU, a natural language
system working in restricted "blocks of words" with restricted
vocabularies was written between 1964 to 1966

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COMPONENTS AND PROCESS

• Components of NLP
• Linguistics and Language
• Steps of NLP
• Techniques and Methods
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Components of NLP
• Natural Language Understanding
• Taking some spoken/typed sentence and working out what it
means

• Natural Language Generation

• Taking some formal representation of what you want to say and
working out a way to express it in a natural (human) language
(e.g., English)

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Components of NLP (cont.)
• Natural Language Understanding
• Mapping the given input in the natural language into a useful
representation
• Different level of analysis required:
• morphological analysis
• syntactic analysis
• semantic analysis
• discourse analysis

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Components of NLP (cont.)
• Natural Language Generation
• Producing output in the natural language from some internal
representation
• Different level of synthesis required:
• deep planning (what to say)
• syntactic generation

• NL Understanding is much harder than NL Generation.

But, still both of them are hard
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Linguistics and language
• Linguistics is the science of language
• Its study includes:
• Sounds which refers to phonology
• Word formation refers to morphology
• Sentence structure refers to syntax
• Meaning refers to semantics
• Understanding refers to pragmatics

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Steps of NLP
Morphological and Lexical Analysis

Syntactic Analysis

Semantic Analysis

Discourse Integration

Pragmatic Analysis 13
Morphological and Lexical
Analysis
• The lexicon of a language is its vocabulary that includes its
words and expressions
• Morphology depicts analyzing, identifying and description of
structure of words
• Lexical analysis involves dividing a text into paragraphs, words
and the sentences

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Syntactic Analysis
• Syntax concerns the proper ordering of words and its affect on
meaning
• This involves analysis of the words in a sentence to depict the
grammatical structure of the sentence
• The words are transformed into structure that shows how the
words are related to each other
• Eg. “the girl the go to the school”. This would definitely be
rejected by the English syntactic analyzer

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Semantic Analysis
• Semantics concerns the (literal) meaning of words, phrases,
and sentences
• This abstracts the dictionary meaning or the exact meaning
from context
• The structures which are created by the syntactic analyzer are
assigned meaning
• E.g.. “colorless blue idea” .This would be rejected by the
analyzer as colorless blue do not make any sense together

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Discourse Integration
• Sense of the context
• The meaning of any single sentence depends upon the
sentences that precedes it and also invokes the meaning of
the sentences that follow it
• E.g. the word “it” in the sentence “she wanted it” depends
upon the prior discourse context

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Pragmatic Analysis
• Pragmatics concerns the overall communicative and social
context and its effect on interpretation
• It means abstracting or deriving the purposeful use of the
language in situations
• Importantly those aspects of language which require world
knowledge
• The main focus is on what was said is reinterpreted on what it
actually means
• E.g. “close the window?” should have been interpreted as a
request rather than an order 18
Natural Language Generation
• NLG is the process of constructing natural language outputs
from non-linguistic inputs
• NLG can be viewed as the reverse process of NL understanding
• A NLG system may have two main parts:
• Discourse Planner
what will be generated. which sentences
• Surface Realizer
realizes a sentence from its internal representation
• Lexical Selection
selecting the correct words describing the concepts 19
Techniques and methods
• Machine learning
• The learning procedures used during machine learning
• Automatically focuses on the most common cases
• Whereas when we write rules by hand it is often not correct at all
• Concerned on human errors

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Techniques and methods
• Statistical inference
• Automatic learning procedures can make use of statistical
inference algorithms
• Used to produce models that are robust (means strength) to
unfamiliar input e.g. containing words or structures that have not
been seen before
• Making intelligent guesses

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Techniques and methods
• Input database and Training data
• Systems based on automatically learning the rules can be made
more accurate simply by supplying more input data or source to it
• However, systems based on hand- written rules can only be made
more accurate by increasing the complexity of the rules, which is
a much more difficult task

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CONCLUSION

• NLP vs. Computer Language

• Future of NLP
• Summery
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Natural language vs. Computer
language
• Ambiguity is the primary difference between natural and
computer languages
• Formal programming languages are designed to be
unambiguous
• They can be defined by a grammar that produces a unique parse
for each sentence in the language
• Programming languages are also designed for efficient
(deterministic) parsing
• They are deterministic context-free languages (DCLFs) 24
Future of NLP
• Human level or human readable natural language processing
is an AI-complete problem
• It is equivalent to solving the central artificial intelligence
problem and making computers as intelligent as people
• Make computers as they can solve problems like humans and
think like humans as well as perform activities that humans
cant perform and making it more efficient than humans

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Cont.…
• NLP's future is closely linked to the growth of Artificial
intelligence
• As natural language understanding or readability improves,
computers or machines or devices will be able to learn from
the information online and apply what they learned in the real
world
• Combined with natural language generation, computers will
become more and more capable of receiving and giving
useful and resourceful information or data
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Summery
• The need for disambiguation makes language understanding
difficult
• Levels of linguistic processing:
• Syntax , Semantics, Pragmatics
• Statistical learning methods can be used to:
• Automatically learn grammar
• Compute the most likely interpretation based on a learned
statistical model
• Make intelligent guesses
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