Introduction

Language is a beautiful thing

• Mechanism for communicating thoughts, dieas, emotions, and more.

Computers hate natural language

• If they could, they would.

Language seems easy, so natural

• In fact, natural language is :

  • Ambiguous

    e.g.

    I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

    I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

    I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

    Pretty little girls school

  • Compositional

    John's red wine is on the table.
    I've had it before. It is a delicious pinot.
    I am worried. It is wobbly.

    What does it refer to?

  • Contextual

    A: Hyperspace travel is unpleasantly, like being drunk.

    B: What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?

    A: You ask a glass of water that.

  • Cultural

  • Personal

    That’s sick.

    could be really sick or fantastic

  • …

  what makes language usable for us is what makes language processing hard for computers

• If language is so hard, how come Google?

  • search
  • translate
  • assist
  • QA
  • scholar

Flavors of NLP

• Linguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Sociology
• Language Interfaces
• Text as a knowledge source

Language Analysis

• Language modeling
• Word Representations
• Parts-of-Speech Tagging
• Syntactic Parsing

Applications

• Named Entity Recognition
• Relation Extraction
• Machine Translation
• Question Answering

Vocabularies

[1]

[2]