Natural language processing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 08:58, 22 February 2003

Revision as of 01:58, 18 March 2003

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; [[Word boundary detection]] : In spoken language, there are no gaps between words; where to place the word boundary often depends on what choice makes the most sense grammatically and given the context.

; [[Word sense disambiguation]] : Any given word can have several different meanings; we have to select the meaning which makes the most sense in context.

; [[Syntactic ambiguity]] : The [[grammar]] for [[natural language]]s is not [[unambiguous grammar|unambiguous]], i.e. there are often multiple possible parse trees for a given sentence. Choosing the correctmost appropriate one usually requires [[semantics|semantic]] and contextuallycontextual information.

; [[Speech acts]] and plans : Sentences often don't mean what they literally meansay; for instance thea correctgood answer to "Can you pass the salt?" is to pass the salt,; in most contexts "Yes" is not a good answer, although "yesNo" is better and "I'm afraid that I can't see it" is better yet. Or again, if a class was not offered last year, the"The class was not offered last year" is a correctbetter answer to the question "How many students failed the class last year?" isthan "The class was not offered last yearNone", not "None"is.