Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural language processing (NLP) aims at enhancing communication via language. The participants involved are not only human, but also computer. In short, NLP focuses on building computer systems which can interact with human by using language, as natural as possible. It is not a trivial work to achieve that goal since computer understands different form of language from what human understand.

Computer scientists and language experts designed various software, algorithms and applications that can make computer understand human language. Language media, such as human voice and text must first be converted to computer readable format for further processing, which in turn result on human understandable language form.

Natural Language Processing is also referred as computational linguistics because it is an intersection of computer science and linguistics. Relevant works for computer scientists usually concern system design, algorithm and application that process language in computer readable format. To design these products they must refer to the phonology, lexicon, grammar, semantics, and other language relevant aspects. In addition, there are so many languages in real world and some NLP applications are specific to one particular language. This is where linguists take role. They provide detail description of language. Computer scientists formalize the language, computers do the process. They also design the system and its interface. Linguists contribute to the computer interaction with human and understanding of human language. Most NLP applications are designed by team so computational linguists might come from different specialization. The sub fields of NLP are machine translation, information retrieval, information extraction, text summarization, opinion mining, question-answering system, dialogue system and computer-assisted language leraning etc.  

   ● Mitkov, R. ed. 2004. The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

   ● Allen, J. 1994. Natural Language Understanding, Benjamin Cummings: Rochester.