Natural Language Processing

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Natural language processing is a subfield of computer science and in artificial intelligence that is concerned with computational processing of natural languages, emulating cognitive capabilities without being committed to a true simulation of cognitive processes. It is a theoretically motivated range of computational techniques for analyzing and representing naturally occurring texts at one or more levels of linguistic analysis for the purpose of achieving human like language processing for a range of tasks or applications. It is a computerized approach to analyzing text that is based on both a set of theories and a set of technologies. NLP is a very active area of research and development. Naturally occurring texts can be of any language, mode and genre etc. The text can be oral or written. The only requirement is that they be in a language used by humans to communicate to one another. Also, the text being analyzed should not be specifically constructed for the purpose of analysis, but rather that the text is gathered from actual usage.

The notion of levels of linguistic analysis refers to the fact that there are multiple types of language processing known to be at work when humans produce or comprehend language. The humans use generally various types of sentences for expressing their feelings. Sentences are classified by structure and usage. A simple sentence has one independent clause comprised of a subject and predicate. A compound sentence consists of two or more independent clauses connected by a conjunction or a semicolon. The way a sentence is used determines its mood, declarative, imperative, interrogative or exclamatory. A word functions in a sentence as a part of speech. Parts of speech for the English language are nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjuctions etc.

Generally NLP is the means for accomplishing a particular task. It is a combination of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. The natural language processing uses the tools of AI such as: algorithms, data structures, formal models for representing knowledge, models or reasoning processes etc. There are two ways through which the natural languages are being processed. First parsing technique and the second is the transition network. The architecture of NLP is given figure .

Figure Architecture of a NLP

In NLP, to interact with the database in natural languages, computer is required to have knowledge of basic alphabet, lexicon, grammar and words formation etc. The inputs are in the form of natural language given by the user. Finally after parsing process the output in the language is being understood by the application program.