NLP - Understanding and Generation #

The Study of Language.
Applications of Natural Language Understanding.
Evaluating Language Understanding Systems.
Different Levels of Language Analysis.
Organisation of Natural Language Understanding Systems.

Learning Objectives #

Explain what Natural Language Processing studies and how it relates to artificial intelligence and linguistics.
Describe why human language is difficult for computers to process.
Recognise the main applications and stages of an NLP pipeline.
Distinguish morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse analysis.
Explain the relationship between natural language understanding and natural language generation.
Identify suitable ways to evaluate different NLP systems.

Big Picture #

flowchart TD
    A[Human Language] --> B[Acquire and Prepare Text or Speech]
    B --> C[Analyse Language Structure]
    C --> D[Represent Meaning and Context]
    D --> E[Model or Reason]
    E --> F[Understand, Predict or Generate]
    F --> G[Evaluate and Improve]

    style A fill:#E1F5FE
    style B fill:#C8E6C9
    style C fill:#FFF9C4
    style D fill:#EDE7F6
    style E fill:#E1F5FE
    style F fill:#C8E6C9
    style G fill:#FFF9C4

1. What Is Natural Language Processing? ☆ #

Natural language processing (NLP) is the discipline of building machines that can manipulate human language - or data that resembles human language - in the way that it is written, spoken, and organised.