Natural Language Processing

English is an example of a natural language, a computer language isn’t. For a computer to process a natural language, it would have to mimic what a human does. That is, the computer would have to recognize the sequence of words spoken by a person or another computer, understand the syntax or grammar of the words (i.e., do a syntactical analysis), and then extract the meaning of the words. A limited amount of meaning can be derived from a sequence of words taken out of context (i.e., by semantic analysis); but much more of the meaning depends on the context in which the words are spoken (e.g., who spoke them, under what circumstances, with what tone, and what else was said, particularly before the words), which would require a pragmatic analysis to extract. To date, natural language processing is poorly developed and computers are not yet able to even approach the ability of humans to extract meaning from natural languages; yet there are already valuable practical applications of the technology.


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Natural Language Processing, English is an example of a natural language, a computer language isn’t. For a computer to process a natural language, it would have to mimic what a human does. That is, the computer would have to recognize the sequence of words spoken by a person or another computer, understand the syntax or grammar of the words (i.e., do a syntactical analysis), and then extract the meaning of the words. A limited amount of meaning can be derived from a sequence of words taken out of context (i.e., by semantic analysis); but much more of the meaning depends on the context in which the words are spoken (e.g., who spoke them, under what circumstances, with what tone, and what else was said, particularly before the words), which would require a pragmatic analysis to extract. To date, natural language processing is poorly developed and computers are not yet able to even approach the ability of humans to extract meaning from natural languages; yet there are already valuable practical applications of the technology.,