Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NLP is the study of computer systems for processing natural languages. NLP is approached by different steps, such as:

Signal Processing: Turning spoken language into a sequence of words.
Morphological analysis: Analyzing individual words into their components and separate and non-word tokens such as punctuation.
Syntactic analysis or parsing: Transforming linear sequences of words into structures showing word relations.
Semantic analysis: Assigning meanings to structures created by the syntactic parser.
Discourse integration: Analyzing the meaning in a sentence with preceding and following sentences.
Pragmatic analysis: The structure representing what was said is reinterpreted to determine what was actually meant.
(Based on Doyle, 1997).

Literature:

Doyle, P. (1997). Natural language. AI Qual Summary. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/%7Ebrd/Teaching/AI/Lectures/Summaries/natlang.html

•Halton, E. (1992). Charles Morris. A Brief Outline of His Philosophy with relations to semiotics, pragmatics, and linguistics. Available at: http://www.nd.edu/~ehalton/Morrisbio.htm

•Hedlund, T.; Pirkola, A. & Kalervo, J. (2001). Aspects of Swedish morphology and semantics from the perspective of mono- and cross-language information retrieval. Information Processing and Management, 37, 147-161.

Liddy, E. D. (1998). Enhanced Text Retrieval Using Natural Language Processing. ASIS Bulletin, April/May. Also available on http://www.asis.org/bulletin/apr.98/liddy.html

Liddy, E. D. (2003). Natural Language Processing. IN: Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. New York: Marcel Dekker.

Smeaton, A. F. (1992). Progress in the application of natural language processing to information retrieval tasks. The Computer Journal, 35(3):268-278.

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 01-03-2007

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Signal Processing: Turning spoken language into a sequence of words.