Natural language processing
In computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP) refers to the computational processing of textual materials in natural human languages. The purpose is to devise techniques that can automatically analyze significant amounts of the spoken or written text in ways parallel to what occurs when humans conduct this task. This field appeared from machine translation in the 1950s and became much influenced by investigations into artificial intelligence. Later work focused on devising ‘intelligent (also expert) programs’ that can model human behavior aspects. For example, how people apply their knowledge of the world and their capability to draw inferences for making interpretations and conclusions. A more concretely linguistic contribution includes detailed syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis, frequently on a much larger scale than hitherto, and applying the large amounts of lexical data presently available in computer corpora [Crystal, p. 322].
NLP blends computational linguistics, namely rule-based modeling of human language, with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. The combination of these technologies enables computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data and to comprehend its whole meaning, complete with the author’s purpose and sentiment. Furthermore, NLP manages computer programs translating text from one language into another, responding to spoken commands, and summarizing significant volumes of text—even in real-time. The tasks of NLP are speech recognition, part of speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, named entity recognition, co-reference resolution, sentiment analysis, and natural language generation [IBM.com].
There are two major stages of natural language processing: data preprocessing and algorithm development.
Data preprocessing includes preparing and cleaning the text data for machines to analyze. This process puts data in a workable form and highlights features in the text that an algorithm can work with. Once the data has been preprocessed, an algorithm is developed to process it [TechTarget].
David Crystal. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th Edition. New-Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Natural Language Processing. IBM.com. Retrieved from: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/natural-language-processing.
Natural Language Processing. TechTarget. Retrieved from: https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/natural-language-processing-NLP.