|
|
| |
Natural Language Processing is a 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 particular tasks or applications. The levels of linguistic analysis are:
- Phonological: interpretation of speech sounds within and across words
- Morphological: componential analysis of words, including prefixes, suffixes and roots
- Lexical: word level analysis including lexical meaning and part of speech analysis
- Syntactic: analysis of words in a sentence in order to uncover the grammatical structure of the sentence
- Semantic: determining the possible meanings of a sentence, including disambiguation of words in context
- Discourse: interpreting structure and meaning conveyed by texts larger than a sentence
- Pragmatic: understanding the purposeful use of language in situations, particularly those aspects of language which require world knowledge
The above levels of linguistic processing reflect an increasing size of unit of analysis as well as increasing complexity and difficulty as we move from top to bottom. The larger the unit of analysis becomes (i.e., from morpheme to word to sentence to paragraph to full document), the less precise the language phenomena and the greater the free choice and variability. This decrease in precision results in fewer discernible rules and more reliance on less predictable regularities as one moves from the lowest to the highest levels. Additionally, higher levels presume reliance on the lower levels of language understanding, and the theories used to explain the data move more into the areas of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. As a result, the lower levels of language processing have been more thoroughly investigated and incorporated into NLP systems. The technologies developed at CNLP utilize all these levels where appropriate, as well as relevant subsets where appropriate.
|
|
|
|
|
