Natural Language Processing

Catalog description

The question addressed by the field of natural language processing (NLP), or computational linguistics, is how to get computers to process human language in a useful manner, such as to extract information from text, to generate text from semantic representations, or to support human-machine interaction through language. This overview course presents natural language processing in two ways. From one perspective, it is an applied computational discipline, where the main goal is to turn language data into computable data. This makes it possible to build many applications where human language is processed, and to invent new applications. NLP is also a theoretical discipline that addresses problems in how to identify the units and structures of language, such as how to specify the vocabulary of a language, how to describe the allowable combinations of words, how to represent the meanings of words and phrases, and how to get at the implicit intentions of language users. The class covers both aspects of NLP.