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NLP Lecture 1

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand and generate human language. It involves various components such as Natural Language Understanding and Generation, which require knowledge of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. The document discusses the complexities of language, including ambiguity and the need for models and algorithms to resolve these ambiguities.

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Shreyas Gujarathi
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4 views

NLP Lecture 1

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand and generate human language. It involves various components such as Natural Language Understanding and Generation, which require knowledge of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. The document discusses the complexities of language, including ambiguity and the need for models and algorithms to resolve these ambiguities.

Uploaded by

Shreyas Gujarathi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Natural Language Processing

Course Code : DLO8012

Dr. Rahul Khokale


Head of the Department
Department of Computer Engineering
St. John College of Engineering and Management, Palghar
What is NLP ?
● Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of a
computer program to understand human language
as it is spoken.
● The process of computer analysis of input provided
in a human language (natural language), and
conversion of this input into a useful form of
representation.
● NLP is a component of artificial intelligence (AI).
● Natural Language Processing (NLP) refers to AI
method of communicating with an intelligent
systems using a natural language such as English.
● Processing of Natural Language is required when
you want an intelligent system like robot to perform
as per your instructions, when you want to hear
decision from a dialogue based clinical expert
system, etc.
● The field of NLP is primarily concerned with getting
computers to perform useful and interesting tasks
with human languages.
● The field of NLP is secondarily concerned with
helping us come to a better understanding of
human language.
• Forms of Natural Language

• The input/output of a NLP system can be:


– written text
– speech
• We will mostly concerned with written text (not speech).
• To process written text, we need:
– lexical, syntactic, semantic knowledge about the language
– discourse information, real world knowledge
• To process spoken language, we need everything required to
process written text, plus the challenges of speech recognition and
speech synthesis.

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 5


• Components of NLP

• 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, …
• 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.

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 6


• Why NL Understanding is hard?

• Natural language is extremely rich in form and structure, and very


ambiguous.
– How to represent meaning,
– Which structures map to which meaning structures.
• One input can mean many different things. Ambiguity can be at different
levels.
– Lexical (word level) ambiguity -- different meanings of words
– Syntactic ambiguity -- different ways to parse the sentence
– Interpreting partial information -- how to interpret pronouns
– Contextual information -- context of the sentence may affect the meaning of that sentence.
• Many input can mean the same thing.
• Interaction among components of the input is not clear.

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 7


• Knowledge of Language

• Phonology – concerns how words are related to the sounds that realize
them.

• Morphology – concerns how words are constructed from more basic


meaning units called morphemes. A morpheme is the primitive unit of
meaning in a language.

• Syntax – concerns how can be put together to form correct sentences and
determines what structural role each word plays in the sentence and what
phrases are subparts of other phrases.

• Semantics – concerns what words mean and how these meaning combine
in sentences to form sentence meaning. The study of context-
independent meaning.

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 8


• Knowledge of Language (cont.)

• Pragmatics – concerns how sentences are used in different situations and


how use affects the interpretation of the sentence.

• Discourse – concerns how the immediately preceding sentences affect


the interpretation of the next sentence. For example, interpreting pronouns
and interpreting the temporal aspects of the information.

• World Knowledge – includes general knowledge about the world. What


each language user must know about the other’s beliefs and goals.

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 9


• Ambiguity

• I made her duck.

• How many different interpretations does this sentence have?


• What are the reasons for the ambiguity?
• The categories of knowledge of language can be thought of as ambiguity
resolving components.
• How can each ambiguous piece be resolved?
• Does speech input make the sentence even more ambiguous?
– Yes – deciding word boundaries

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 10


• Ambiguity (cont.)

• Some interpretations of : I made her duck.


1. I cooked duck for her.
2. I cooked duck belonging to her.
3. I created a toy duck which she owns.
4. I caused her to quickly lower her head or body.
5. I used magic and turned her into a duck.
• duck – morphologically and syntactically ambiguous:
• noun or verb.
• her – syntactically ambiguous: dative or possessive.
• make – semantically ambiguous: cook or create.
• make – syntactically ambiguous:
–. Transitive – takes a direct object. => 2
–. Di-transitive – takes two objects. => 5
–. Takes a direct object and a verb. => 4

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 11


• Ambiguity in a Turkish Sentence

• Some interpretations of: Adamı gördüm.


1. I saw the man.
2. I saw my island.
3. I visited my island.
4. I bribed the man.
• Morphological Ambiguity:
–. ada-m-ı ada+P1SG+ACC
–. adam-ı adam+ACC
• Semantic Ambiguity:
–. gör to see
–. gör to visit
–. gör to bribe

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 12


• Resolve Ambiguities

• We will introduce models and algorithms to resolve ambiguities at


different levels.
• part-of-speech tagging -- Deciding whether duck is verb or noun.
• word-sense disambiguation -- Deciding whether make is create or
cook.
• lexical disambiguation -- Resolution of part-of-speech and word-
sense ambiguities are two important kinds of lexical disambiguation.
• syntactic ambiguity -- her duck is an example of syntactic ambiguity,
and can be addressed by probabilistic parsing.

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 13


• Resolve Ambiguities (cont.)
• I made her duck

• S S

•
• NP VP NP VP

• I V NP NP I V NP
•
•
• made her duck made DET N

• her duck

• BİL711 Natural Language Processing • 14

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