Natural language processing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:56, 19 December 2003

Revision as of 05:06, 2 January 2004

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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. In written form, languages like [[Chinese language|Chinese]] do not have word boundaries either.

; [[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 treestree]]s for a given sentence. Choosing the most appropriate one usually requires [[semantics|semantic]] and contextual information.

; Imperfect or irregular input: Foreign or regional accents and vocal impediments in speech; typing or grammatical errors, [[OCR]] errors in texts.

; [[Speech acts]] and plans : Sentences often don't mean what they literally say; for instance a good answer to "Can you pass the salt" is to pass the salt; in most contexts "Yes" is not a good answer, although "No" 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 class was not offered last year" is a better answer to the question "How many students failed the class last year?" than "None" is.